CONSTANTINOPLE, the Acropolis of the universe, the imperial capital of the Romans, which, by the will of God, was under the power of the Latins, has come again under the power of the Romans—this has been granted them by the will of God through us.” These are the words in the autobiography of Michael Palaeologus, the first Emperor of the restored Byzantine Empire.1
General situation in the Empire
The territory of Michael’s Empire was greatly reduced from the territory of Byzantium in the epoch of the Comneni and Angeli, especially after the First Crusade. In 1261 the Empire comprised the northwestern corner of Asia Minor, the major part of Thrace and Macedonia, Thessalonica, and several islands in the northern part of the Aegean Sea (Archipelago). Accordingly, the Bosphorus and Hellespont, these exceedingly important strategic and commercial waterways, belonged to the restored Empire. The Despotat of Epirus came under the Empire’s suzerainty. At the very beginning of his reign Michael received as ransom for the prince of Achaia, William Villehardouin, captured by the Greeks in the battle of Castoria, three strong Frankish fortresses in the Peloponnesus: Monemvasia, situated on the eastern coast, the great rock rising out of the sea near the ancient Epidaurus Limera, which is “not only one of the most picturesque sites of the Peloponnesus, but has a splendid record of heroic independence which entitles it to a high place in the list of the world’s fortresses”;2 the well-known fortified castle of Mistra; and Maina, another castle erected by the Franks in the mountains of Taygetus to overawe the Slavs dwelling there. These three strongholds became the strategic bases of support from which the troops of the Byzantine emperors successfully fought the Frankish dukes.
But the rest of the formerly great Empire was menaced on all sides by peoples politically or economically strong: the Turks threatened from Asia Minor, the Serbs and Bulgars from the north; the Venetians occupied some of the islands of the Archipelago, the Genoese, certain points on the Black Sea, and the Latin knights, the Peloponnesus and a portion of Middle Greece. Michael Palaeologus was not able even to unite all the Greek centers. The Empire of Trebizond continued to live a separate and independent life and the Byzantine possessions in the Crimea—the theme of Cherson (Korsun) with the adjacent country frequently referred to as “the Gothic Klimata”—were in the power of the emperors of Trebizond and paid them tribute. The Despotat of Epirus was only to a certain extent dependent upon the restored Empire of Michael. Under Michael Palaeologus the Empire reached the widest limits of the last period of its existence, but these limits were preserved only during his reign, so that “in this respect Michael Palaeologus was the first and also the last powerful emperor of restored Byzantium.”3 The Empire of the first Palaeologus resembled, to the French scholar, Diehl, “a slender, dislocated, miserable body upon which rested an enormous head—Constantinople.”4
The capital, which had never recovered after the sack of 1204, passed into the hands of Michael in a state of decay and ruin; the best and richest buildings stood as if recently sacked; the churches had been robbed of their precious furnishings; the palace of Blachernae, which, from the time of the Comneni, had been the imperial residence and had dazzled strangers with its rich decorations and mosaics, was completely devastated; inside it was, said a Greek contemporary, “full of Italian smoke and fume”5 from the carousals of the Latin emperors, and was therefore uninhabitable.
Though the Byzantine Empire of the Palaeologi continued to be of great importance from a cultural standpoint, Constantinople ceased to be one of the centers of European policy. “After the restoration under the Palaeologi the Empire has almost exclusively the local significance of a national Greek medieval kingdom, which, in substance, is the continuation of the Empire of Nicaea, though it established itself in the Blachernae and arrayed itself in the antiquated forms of the old Byzantine Empire.”6 Round this aging organism younger peoples were growing and gathering strength, especially the Serbs of the fourteenth century under Stephen Dušan (Dushan) and the Ottoman Turks. The enterprising commercial Italian republics, Genoa and Venice, especially the former, got control of the whole trade of the Empire, which became wholly dependent on them financially and economically. The only question was which of these peoples would put an end to the Empire of the eastern Christians, seize Constantinople, and become master of the Balkan peninsula. The history of the fourteenth century was to answer this question in favor of the Turks.
But if in the sphere of political international life Byzantium under the Palaeologi played a secondary part, its internal life was of great importance. In the epoch of the Palaeologi one may note the interesting fact of the rise of patriotism among the Greek people, accompanied by a turning back to the glories of ancient Greece. For instance, officially the emperors continued to bear the usual title of “basileus and autocrat of the Romans,” but some prominent men of the time tried to persuade the basileus to take the new title of “Emperor of the Hellenes.” The former vast Empire, made up of different nationalities, was transformed into a state small in its territorial limits and Greek in its composition. In the manifestation of Hellenic patriotism in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and in the profound enthusiasm felt for the glorious Hellenic past one may see, not without reason, one of the elements which in the nineteenth century was to contribute to the regeneration of modern Greece. Moreover, the epoch of the Palaeologi, when in the Empire the elements of East and West were marvelously interwoven, was marked by a powerful spiritual and artistic culture, which, considering the severe external and internal troubles, is at first sight unexpected. At that time Byzantium produced not a few scholars and educated men, writers, sometimes of very original talent, in the most varied fields of knowledge. And such monuments of art as the mosaics in the mosque of Kahrieh jami (Qahriye-jami, the Byzantine church of the Chora), the Peloponnesian Mistra, and the churches of Athos are the basis for appreciation of the importance of artistic creation under the Palaeologi. This artistic flowering has often been compared with the primitive renaissance of art in western Europe, that is to say, the earlier period of Italian Humanism. These phenomena in the field of literature and art and the most important problems which made their appearance in connection with them in the works of many scholars of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries belong to a later section on Byzantine culture in the epoch of the Palaeologi.
To the time of the Palaeologi belong the least investigated problems of Byzantine history. The reason is the extraordinary complexity of the history of the epoch, in external and especially in internal affairs, on the one hand, and on the other, the abundance and variety of the sources, many of which have not yet been published and are preserved in manuscript collections in western and eastern libraries. To date, there exists no complete monograph on any of the Palaeologi which covers all phases of their rule; the existing essays treat of only one side or another of their activity. There is one exception. In 1926 appeared a monograph on Michael Palaeologus by C. Chapman, brief and superficial but of general character.7
The dynasty of the Palaeologi belonged to a very well-known Greek family which, beginning with the first Comneni, gave Byzantium many energetic and gifted men, especially in the military field. They became related, in the course of time, to the imperial families of the Comneni, Ducae, and Angeli; on the strength of this relationship the first Palaeologi, Michael VIII always, Andronicus II for the most part, as well as his co-emperor and son, Michael IX, and sometimes, perhaps, Andronicus III, signed four family names, for example, Michael Ducas Angelus Comnenus Palaeologus. Later on the Emperors signed only “Palaeologus.”8
The dynasty of the Palaeologi occupied the Byzantine throne for one hundred and ninety-two years (1261–1453), the longest dynasty in the whole course of Byzantine history.9 The first Palaeologus who mounted the throne of the shaken and greatly curtailed Eastern Empire, Michael VIII (1261–82), cunning, cruel, but talented and an artful diplomat, succeeded in saving the Empire from the terrible danger from the West, that is, from the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, and bequeathed the throne to his son Andronicus II the Elder (1282–1328), whom “nature had intended for a professor of theology but accident had made a Byzantine emperor.”10 Andronicus married twice. His first wife, Anne, was a daughter of the king of Hungary, Stephen V; his second wife, Violanta-Irene, a sister of the north-Italian marquess of Montferrat, after her brother’s death, became the heiress to the margravate; unable as a Byzantine empress to accept the margravate, she sent there one of her sons who founded at Montferrat the dynasty of the Palaeologi, which ceased only in the first half of the sixteenth century.11
Andronicus in 1295 crowned with the imperial crown his eldest son by his first wife, Michael. Michael died in 1320, before his father, and is often referred to in historical works as his father’s co-emperor, Michael IX. Negotiations were entered upon to marry Michael to Catherine de Courtenay, daughter of the titulary Emperor of Romania (of the former Latin Empire), and the pope was greatly interested in this project;12 but, in the end, Michael married an Armenian princess, Xenia-Maria.
The son of Michael IX and grandson of Andronicus II, young Andronicus, was for many years during his father’s lifetime his grandfather’s favorite. But Andronicus was frivolous and given to love affairs, and one of his adventures ended in the accidental murder of his brother and as a result the premature death of his father, Michael IX. This entirely changed the grandfather’s attitude. Civil war broke out between grandfather and grandson. Against Andronicus the Elder formed a strong party of opponents whose leading spirit was the later famous Cantacuzene. The civil war ended in favor of Andronicus the Younger who, in 1328, suddenly seized Constantinople and induced Andronicus the Elder to abdicate. The old deposed Emperor, whose long reign had been a new period of decay for Byzantium, ended his days as a monk. He died in 1332.
At the head of the government of Andronicus the Younger (1328–1341) stood the chief leader in his rebellion, John Cantacuzene, into whose hands passed the internal administration and the foreign affairs of the Empire. The new Emperor, giving himself up as before to amusements and hunting parties, felt no inclination to occupy himself with state affairs, but nevertheless took a personal part in the many wars fought during his reign. Cantacuzene was not satisfied with the tremendous influence he had obtained, for he aimed at the imperial throne, or at least at an omnipotent regency. This idea possessed him during the thirteen years of Andronicus’ government and was the motivating force of all his activity. Andronicus’ mother, the widow Xenia-Maria, and his second wife, a western princess, Anne of Savoy,13 were both hostile to Cantacuzene. But by various intrigues he succeeded in maintaining his position until the very death of Andronicus.
At the death of Andronicus III in 1341, the new Emperor, John V, his eldest son, was hardly eleven years of age (1341–91). A long civil war, in which John Cantacuzene played the chief part, was fought around the throne of the boy Emperor. Against John Cantacuzene there formed a strong party consisting of the widow of the late Emperor, Anne of Savoy, who had been proclaimed regent; her partisan and the former favorite of Cantacuzene, the ambitious and powerful Alexius Apocaucus, the patriarch; and others. The characteristic feature of the civil strife of the fourteenth century was the participation, now on one side, now on the other, of foreign peoples pursuing their own political aims, Serbs, Bulgars, and especially Seljuq Turks as well as Ottoman Turks. Several months after the death of Andronicus III, Cantacuzene, in one of the cities of Thrace, proclaimed himself Emperor (John VI). Shortly after, the solemn coronation of John V Palaeologus was celebrated in Constantinople. Thus in the Empire there appeared two emperors. Cantacuzene, who had found strong support from the Turks (he had even married his daughter to an Ottoman sultan), gained the upper hand. His chief rival Apocaucus was slain in Constantinople. Cantacuzene was crowned at Hadrianople by the patriarch of Jerusalem, who put on the head of the new emperor a golden crown. Then the capital opened its gates to him. The regent Anne of Savoy was induced to yield, and Cantacuzene was recognized Emperor on a par with John Palaeologus. In 1347, Cantacuzene was crowned for the second time, and his daughter Helena was married to the young Palaeologus. Cantacuzene’s ambitious plans were realized.
In the same year there stood for a short time at the head of the government in Rome a famous dreamer imbued with the recollections of the past glory of the Roman Republic, the tribune Cola di Rienzo. Cantacuzene sent him an embassy with a letter of congratulation upon his attainment of power over Rome.14
The stormy rule of Cantacuzene, during which John Palaeologus was pushed into the background, was important for the international relations of the epoch. For himself Cantacuzene devoted his energies to superseding Palaeologus; he proclaimed his son Emperor, declared him co-emperor and heir, and forbade the name of John Palaeologus to be mentioned in the churches or at public festivities. But Cantacuzene’s influence with the people was gradually declining, and the last blow to his popularity was dealt by the establishment of the Turks in Europe. With the co-operation of the Genoese, John Palaeologus entered Constantinople at the end of 1354. Compelled to abdicate, Cantacuzene took the monastic habit under the name of Ioasaph and spent the rest of his life in writing his important memoirs.15 In a Greek manuscript in the National Library of Paris are preserved two interesting miniatures of Cantacuzene; in one Cantacuzene is represented twice, in imperial robes and in monastic raiment. His son also abdicated.
John V Palaeologus finally became sole Emperor, but received, especially after the destructive civil war and foreign failures, a pitiful heritage. According to T. Florinsky, “Some islands and one province (Thrace) thoroughly ruined and depopulated, on one side of which, close to the capital, the rapacious Genoese had a footing, while on the other side rose the powerful Turkish state: this was the Empire which he had to govern.”16
Moreover, John’s family troubles were not ended. He had never been intimate with his eldest son Andronicus, who in 1376, with the help of the Genoese, deposed his father, was crowned as Andronicus IV (1376–79), and made his son John co-emperor. The old John V, as well as his favorite son and heir, Manuel, were put in prison. In 1379 John V succeeded in escaping and, with the help of the Turks, regained his throne. John V and Andronicus came to an agreement which lasted until the death of the latter in 1385. After that John V, disregarding his grandson John, crowned as co-emperor his son Manuel. Finally, at the very end of the reign of John V, a rebellion was raised against him by his grandson. In 1390 the young John seized Constantinople and governed it, but only for a few months, under the title of John VII. New documents from the archives of Venice indicate that John’s rebellion of 1390 was organized by Sultan Bayazid. The Venetian Senate, as usual very well-informed of the situation in Constantinople through its merchants, apparently judged it probable that Bayazid would be at that time on the Byzantine throne. In any case, in the instructions given the Venetian envoys about to go to Constantinople in 1390, they were admonished: “If you find Murad’s son [Bayazid] in Constantinople, you must try to obtain from him the repeal of the sequestration of Venetian vessels.”17 Owing to the activity of Manuel, John V was restored. At the beginning of 1391 John V died after a long, stormy and unhappy reign. His son Manuel became Emperor (1391–1425).
A short time before his ascension to the throne the new Emperor had married Helena, daughter of the ruler of Northern Macedonia, Constantine Dragosh (Dragases), a Slav, or, as C. Jireĉek said, “the only Serbian who became Empress of Byzantium.”18 She gave birth to six sons, of whom two became the last Byzantine emperors, John VIII and Constantine XI; the latter is often given the Slavonic name of his grandfather on his mother’s side, Dragosh (Dragases). The two last Palaeologi on the imperial throne were accordingly half-Slav. A picture of Helena, surnamed Palaeologina, is on a beautiful miniature in a precious Greek manuscript at the museum of the Louvre in Paris. In this miniature are Emperor Manuel, his wife Helena, and three of their sons, crowned by the Virgin Mary. This manuscript, one of the jewels of the Louvre, containing the works of St. Dionysius the Areopagite, was sent to Paris by Manuel as a present some years after his return to Constantinople from Paris.19 Another portrait of Helena has been preserved on a lead seal or molybdobullon.20
Manuel, handsome, noble, very well educated, and endowed with literary talent, even as a youth during his father’s lifetime felt sharply all the horror of the situation of the Empire and all the humiliating burden of his heritage. When the government of Thessalonica was confided to him by his father, he entered into negotiations with the population of a Macedonian city captured by the troops of the Sultan Murad with the aim of annihilating the Turkish garrison and freeing the city from the Turkish yoke. The sultan learned of the plan and determined to punish severely the governor of Thessalonica. Unable to make an adequate resistance, Manuel, after a fruitless attempt to take refuge with his frightened father, set out directly to the residence of Murad and expressed to him his repentance for his behavior. “The impious but reasonable sultan,” said a historian of the fifteenth century, “favorably kept him as a guest for several days, and, supplying him when he took his leave, with food for his journey and rich presents, sent him back to his father with a letter in which he begged John V to pardon his son for what he had done in ignorance.” In his valedictory address to Manuel, Murad said: “Govern peacefully what belongs to you and do not seek for foreign lands. But if you have need of money or any other support, I shall always be glad to fulfill your request.”21
Later, Murad’s successor Bayazid required that John V send him, with the stipulated tribute, his son Manuel and some Greek auxiliaries. Manuel was compelled to yield and take part in a predatory Turkish expedition through various regions of Asia Minor. His humiliation, complete impotence, and the privations of the expedition are clearly felt in Manuel’s letters. Having described famine, cold, fatigue, and the crossing of the mountains, “where even wild beasts could not feed,” Manuel made a tragic remark: “all this is being suffered jointly by the whole army; but one thing is unbearable for us: we are fighting with them [the Turks] and for them, and it means that we increase their strength and decrease ours.”22 In another letter Manuel wrote an account of the destroyed cities which he had seen during the expedition: “To my question what was the name of those cities, those whom I asked, answered: ‘As we have destroyed them, so time has destroyed their names’; and immediately sorrow seized me; but I sorrow silently, being still able to conceal my feelings.”23 Such humiliation and subserviency towards the Turks Manuel had been forced to suffer before he ascended the throne.
His nobility was manifest when he redeemed his father John V from the Venetians who, on the Emperor’s return from Italy, had arrested him at Venice on account of his failure to pay back borrowed money. While the eldest son of John, Andronicus, who ruled the Empire in his father’s absence, was deaf to John’s prayers to collect the sum due, Manuel obtained it at once and, going to Venice in person, redeemed his father from his humiliating captivity.
After his long and painful reign Manuel, in the last years of his life, withdrew from state affairs, which he entrusted to his son John, and devoted all his time to the study of the Scriptures. Shortly after, Manuel was struck with apoplexy; two days before his death he took holy orders under the name of Matthias (Matthew).
His son and successor, John VIII, reigned from 1425 to 1448. The new Emperor was married three times, and all three wives belonged to different nationalities. His first wife was a young Russian princess, Anna, daughter of the grand prince of Moscow, Vasili I; she lived in Constantinople only three years, but in that short time she became very popular in the capital. She fell a victim to the plague. John’s second wife was an Italian, Sophia of Montferrat, a woman of lofty spiritual qualities but so unattractive in appearance that John felt only repulsion for her; the Byzantine historian Ducas, who describes her appearance, gave a popular proverb of his time: “Lent in front and Easter behind.”24 She could not bear her humiliating position at court, and, with the help of the Genoese of Galata and to the satisfaction of her husband, fled to Italy, where she ended her days in monastic retirement. His third wife John found in a princess of Trebizond, Maria (Mary), of the house of the Comneni, “who was distinguished for her beauty and good manners.”25 The attractiveness of this charming lady is remarked both by a Byzantine historian, and by a French pilgrim to the Holy Land, who was enraptured by the beauty of the basilissa when he saw her leaving St. Sophia.26 She possessed great influence over the Emperor, who outlived her. There stands today in one of the Princes Islands (near Constantinople) a small chapel of the Holy Virgin erected by the beautiful Empress of Trebizond.
John VIII had no children by any of his three wives. When he died in the autumn of 1448, the question of an heir arose. The Empress mother, Manuel II’s wife, who was still alive; the brothers of the late Emperor; and the highest officials of Constantinople fixed their choice upon Constantine, one of the brothers of John VIII, who at that time was the Despot of Morea. The sultan was informed of the choice of the new Emperor and approved the candidate. A deputation was sent to Morea, which notified Constantine of his election to the tottering throne of the once great Empire of Byzantium. At the beginning of 1449, from medieval Sparta, that is from the residence of the Despot at Mistra, he sailed at once for Constantinople in a Catalonian vessel and was solemnly received by the people. It was long believed that Constantine XI was crowned by a layman. But it is now known, since the publication of the works of John Eugenicus by Sp. Lampros, that the coronation of Constantine XI was never performed officially at all. The Church demanded that it should be performed by the patriarch, but it was probably postponed because of the tense antagonism between the partisans of the union of the churches and their opponents.27 Constantine had been twice married, both of his wives belonging to Latin families which had established themselves in the Christian East—one to the family of Tocco, the other to the Genoese dynasty in the island of Lesbos, of Gattilusio—but both had died before Constantine’s election to the Byzantine throne. The negotiations concerning a third wife for the new Emperor, in the West and East, at Venice, Portugal, Trebizond, and Iberia (Georgia), came to nothing. The fall of Constantinople and Constantine’s death prevented the fulfillment of these matrimonial plans. His intimate friend, a diplomat and historian of the epoch of the Palaeologi, George Phrantzes, preserved in his History an interesting description of his mission to find a bride for the Emperor in Trebizond and Iberia.28The French historian Diehl remarked that, despite continued matrimonial intercourse between the Byzantine emperors and western princesses, at the critical moment the eyes of the last Emperor, in search of a bride, turned to the near, congenial, and kindred East.29
Constantine XI was killed in May 1453, at the taking of Constantinople by the Turks. On the site of the Christian eastern monarchy was founded the strong military empire of the Ottoman Turks.
Of the brothers who survived Constantine, Demetrius Palaeologus was captured by Muhammed II, to whom his daughter was married, and died at Hadrianople as a monk, under the name of David. Another brother, Thomas, ended his days in Italy dreaming of a crusade against the Turks, receiving from the pope his means of subsistence. His son Andreas (Andrew), who had already become a Catholic, was the only legitimate representative of the dynasty of the Palaeologi who possessed rights to the lost Byzantine throne. An interesting document exists in which Andreas Palaeologus transmitted his rights to the Empires of Constantinople and Trebizond as well as to the Despotat of Serbia to the king of France, Charles VIII. When the latter at the end of the fifteenth century undertook his expedition against Naples, he considered it only as the steppingstone to eventual conquest of Constantinople and Jerusalem. In other words, at the end of the fifteenth century dreams of a crusade still existed. Andreas’ transmission of his rights to Charles VIII seems never to have been fully carried out, for later Andreas again transmitted his rights to the Byzantine throne to Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain (Castile).30 This act, of course, had no practical result.
Zoë, the daughter of Thomas Palaeologus and the sister of Andreas, was married to the far distant Grand Prince of Moscow, Ivan (John) III, and is known in Russian sources as Sophia Palaeologina. A Russian historian, Kluchevsky, said: “As heiress to the declining house of Byzantium, the new Tsarina of Russia had transferred the supreme rights of the Byzantine house to Moscow, as to a new Tsargrad, and there shared them with her husband.”31
Moscow began to be compared with “seven-hilled Rome” and called “the third Rome.” The Grand Prince of Moscow became “Tsar of all Orthodoxy,” and Moscow as the capital of the Russian state became “the new city of Constantine” (i.e., a new Constantinople-Tsargrad).32 A Russian scholar of the beginning of the sixteenth century, the monk Philotheus, wrote: “Two Romes have fallen, and the third stands, while a fourth is not to be.”33 The pope called the attention of the successor of Ivan III to his right to defend his “patrimony of Constantinople.”34 Thus, the fall of Constantinople and the marriage of Ivan III to Sophia Palaeologina brought up the problem of the rights of the rulers of Moscow, those representatives and defenders of eastern Orthodoxy, to the throne of the Byzantine Empire which was seized by the Ottoman Turks in 1453.
The external policy of Michael VIII
Byzantium and the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, Charles of Anjou, and the Sicilian Vespers.—The attitude of Michael VIII towards the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies is the keystone to his external policy. In connection with this attitude were developing and shaping his relations with the Italian republics, Genoa and Venice, as well as with the papal curia. His relations with the Turks in the East also depended upon his western policy.
At the close of the twelfth century, the king of Germany, Henry VI Hohenstaufen, Frederick Barbarossa’s son, owing to his marriage with the Norman princess Constance, heiress to the Norman state in southern Italy and Sicily, gained control of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies and inherited the stubborn enmity of the Normans for Byzantium and their aggressive plans. The union of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies with Germany lasted till 1250, when, at the death of Frederick II Hohenstaufen, his natural son Manfred became king of Sicily. The legitimate son of Frederick, Conrad, began to rule in Germany and reigned for a short time. Under the rule of Manfred, who took care not only of the material but also of the spiritual interests of his kingdom, Sicily enjoyed a period of peace. His court was the most brilliant of that time; foreign rulers esteemed him highly; and the last Latin Emperor Baldwin II, who had fled from Constantinople, appealed to him for help in regaining his lost throne. With regard to Byzantium, Manfred adopted the policy of his predecessors which must have seriously alarmed Michael VIII, especially from the point of view of possible Latin re-establishment at Constantinople. Baldwin II, deprived of his throne, appeared at Manfred’s court with definite plans and requests for help. Moreover, the podestá (the chief representative) of the Genoese who lived at Constantinople and possessed at that time exceptionally favorable trade conditions in Byzantium, entered into negotiations with Manfred. He proposed to him a plan for the sudden capture of Constantinople and the restoration of Latin dominion there. Informed of this, the infuriated Michael VIII sent the Genoese away from the capital and opened negotiations with Venice, the result of which was a new treaty with the Republic of St. Mark restoring and confirming the previous privileges of the Venetians, and binding them, along with the Greeks, to fight against the Genoese if they opened hostilities against the Empire.
But Manfred had no time to take actual steps against Byzantium; he fell a victim to papal intrigue. The pope, seeing that after the death of Frederick II, the irreconcilable enemy of the papacy, the strength of the Hohenstaufens was weakened, determined to deal a death blow to the hated dynasty by destroying Manfred. Charles of Anjou, brother of the king of France, Louis IX (St. Louis), became the executor of the papal plans. In inviting Charles to take the Kingdom of Sicily, the pope had in view not only the destruction of the Hohenstaufens, but also the help which Charles would furnish for the restoration of the Latin Empire in the East. At least, in 1265, Pope Clement IV expressed the hope that with the aid of Charles “the position of the Roman Empire would be restored” (imperii Romani status reformabitur).35 Accepting the pope’s proposal to interfere in south-Italian affairs, Charles of Anjou opened the era of French expeditions to Italy—an era very destructive to the essential interests and needs of France which, for several centuries, was to spend her energy and means on Italy, instead of turning her forces and attention to her nearest neighbors, for example, to the Netherlands and the Rhinelands.
Few prominent figures of history have been portrayed by historians so darkly as Charles of Anjou, and perhaps they have not been quite just. Recent works on Charles have put aside forever the legend which made him a real tyrant, “covetous, cunning, and wicked, always ready to drown in blood the smallest resistance.”36 In their appeals to Charles the popes seem not to have taken into consideration the distinctive features of his character which entirely precluded the possibility of his becoming a mere tool in the hands of another. He was a well-trained, energetic, at times severe, even cruel, ruler, but not without cheerfulness, a love of tournaments, and an interest in poetry, art, and science; above all he was unwilling to become a puppet in the hands of the pope who had invited him to Italy.
On his coming to Italy with an army, Charles crushed Manfred at Beneventum in 1266. With Manfred’s death, Sicily and Naples came under French sway. Charles of Anjou became the new king of the Two Sicilies. The French began to leave their country in masses and emigrate into Charles’ new dominions, where general conditions were excellent.37
Shortly after, Charles’ attitude toward Byzantium was clearly shown. With the consent and in the presence of the pope, at Viterbo, a small Italian city north of Rome, he made a treaty with the expelled Latin Emperor, Baldwin II, in which the latter transmitted to Charles his right to the supreme power over all Frankish dominions in the former Latin Empire, reserving to himself only Constantinople and several islands in the Archipelago, which Charles was to help him reconquer from the Greeks. The Norman claims to Byzantium thus revived again in full measure under the French sway in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies.
Realizing fully the approaching danger, Michael VIII had recourse to skillful diplomacy. On the one hand, by means of negotiations with the pope concerning the union between the eastern and western churches, Michael diverted him from close co-operation with Charles, and made him wish for a conciliatory policy regarding Byzantium. On the other hand, Michael decided to make peace with the Genoese who, as has been mentioned above, had established relations with Manfred of Sicily, planned to hand Constantinople over to the Latins, and thereupon had been expelled from the capital. The Genoese were allowed to return to Constantinople, where some quarters were allotted to them not in the city itself, but in its suburb of Galata, across the Golden Horn. This distance did not prevent the Genoese from regaining all their former trade privileges, expanding their commercial activity, and forcing the Venetians, their rivals, into the background. A Genoese of the family of Zacearia, for example, who obtained from the Emperor the right to work and exploit rich deposits of alum in the mountains of Asia Minor, near the city of Phocaea (in Italian, Fogia, Foglia) at the entrance into the Gulf of Smyrna, made a colossal fortune.38 Finally, all over the Byzantine East, under the Palaeologi, Genoa took the place of Venice.
Meanwhile, Charles of Anjou seized the island of Corfu, which was the first step in carrying out his plan of invading Byzantium. Michael VIII, hoping to be more successful in his conciliatory policy towards the pope and to imitate the aggressive policy of Charles of Anjou, appealed to the latter’s brother, the king of France, Louis IX, who was the most pious, just, and esteemed ruler of that time. Shortly before Michael’s appeal to him, England had begged him to be arbiter and to settle some complicated problems of her internal life. Circumstances tended to involve Louis also in the history of Byzantium. Michael sent Louis IX a manuscript of the New Testament adorned with miniatures. When at the close of the seventh decade the Byzantine envoys arrived in France “in view of the reunion of the Greek and Roman churches,” Michael proposed to the king of France that he should “settle as an arbiter the conditions of the union of the two churches, and assured him in advance of his full concurrence.”39
At the outset, Louis IX disapproved of the decision of his brother Charles to conquer southern Italy and only later does he seem to have become reconciled to the fait accompli, probably because he was persuaded of its utility for a future crusade. Moreover, Charles’ plan of conquering Byzantium also met with Louis’ serious objection, because, if the main forces of Charles were diverted to Constantinople, they would be unable to take an adequate part in the crusade to the Holy Land, an idea which strongly influenced Louis. Besides, Michael’s decision, with which Louis had been acquainted through the embassy, to beg him to be arbiter in the problem of the church union, and the Emperor’s promise to submit entirely to his decision, inclined the king of France, a zealous Catholic, to the side of the Byzantine Emperor.
It could hardly be expected that pressure from Louis would really persuade his warlike brother to give up his aggressive plans against the Empire. But Charles was somewhat delayed in his hostilities against Byzantium by Louis’ second crusade to Tunis, which encroached upon the policy of Charles in the West. The question of Charles’ attitude as to the origin of this crusade, is one on which scholars’ opinions vary.40 The sudden death of Louis in Tunis in 1270 destroyed Michael’s hopes of his co-operation. The Byzantine, envoys, who had arrived in Tunis for negotiations a short time before Louis’ death, went back, said a Greek source, “with hands empty of promises.”41 Charles made his appearance in Tunis and after two brilliant victories compelled the emir of Tunis to make peace on his terms, that the emir should indemnify Charles for his military expenses and pay him an annual tribute. Charles then decided to carry out his plan of invading Byzantium. But on his way back from Tunis a terrible storm destroyed a major part of his fleet, so that, at least for a time, he was unable to undertake the offensive against Byzantium on such a large scale as he had planned.
At the beginning of the seventies, however, Charles was able to send a considerable number of auxiliaries to the Peloponnesus, into Achaia, where they fought successfully against the imperial troops. At the same time Charles succeeded in establishing himself in the Balkan peninsula. He seized several fortified places, the most important of which was Dyrrachium (Durazzo, Draĉ), on the east coast of the Ionian Sea; the Albanian mountaineers became Charles’ subjects, and the Despot of Epirus took the oath to him. Accordingly, the king of the Two Sicilies began to style himself the king of Albania (regnum Albaniae).42
In a document he names himself “by the Grace of God the King of Sicily and Albania” (Dei gratia rex Sicilie et Albanie.)43 In a letter Charles writes that the Albanians “elected us and our heirs kings and perpetual masters of the said kingdom” (nos et heredes nostros elegerunt in reges et dominos perpetuos dicti Regni).44 An Italian historian of the twentieth century remarks: “When Charles’ work is better studied and known, he will appear in his true light, as a dim precursor of the political and civil autonomy of the Albanian people that, even at the beginning of the twentieth century, seems a dream and a vague and indetermined aspiration.”45 But Charles was not satisfied. He addressed the Serbs and Bulgars and found in them zealous allies. The envoys of “imperatoris Vulgarorum et regis Servie” appeared at his court.46 The southern Slavs began to crowd into his service and to emigrate into his Italian dominions. A Russian scholar, who was well acquainted with the Italian archives and from them drew a great deal of information on the Slavs, V. Makushev, wrote that, in spite of the incomplete and laconic material, “one may form an idea of the course of the Slavonic settlements in southern Italy and of the great number of Slavs pouring from all quarters of the south-Slavonic world into the service of the Angevins…. The Slavonic settlements in southern Italy, from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century, are constantly increasing: new ones are being founded, the old ones are growing.”47 In a document of 1323 at Naples is mentioned “a quarter called Bulgarian” (vicus qui vocatur Bulgarus).48 The Serbian and Bulgarian envoys arrived in Naples for negotiations. Obviously serious danger threatened Byzantium from the Slavo-French allies. Moreover, Venice, which occupied a most important place in the political, economic, and commercial life of Charles’ realm, was also on a friendly footing with him and for the time being supported his imperialistic policy in the East.49 In addition, the last Emperor of Nicaea, John IV Lascaris, deposed and blinded by Michael VIII, escaped from his Byzantine prison and, at Charles’ invitation, appeared at his court.
Thus, around Charles of Anjou gradually assembled all those who were dissatisfied with and offended by the Byzantine Emperor; the Serbs and Bulgars, Baldwin II and John IV Lascaris, even cautious Venice, became tools in the hands of the ambitious and skillful king. The marriage between Baldwin’s son and Charles’ daughter gave Baldwin the hope, with the aid of his new relative, of restoring the Latin Empire. Such was the general international situation in Italy and the Balkan peninsula, which must have roused extreme fear in Michael VIII for Constantinople and his throne.50
But the skillful politician Charles faced in Michael VIII a politician no less skillful, who concentrated his chief attention upon the papal curia, to which he promised the union of the churches. Pope Gregory X willingly inclined to the desire of the Emperor, not only from fear of the increasing power of Charles, which could not but alarm him, but because of his sincere desire to establish ecclesiastical peace and unity and to further the liberation of Jerusalem. In his peaceful policy of coming to an understanding with the eastern church Gregory X undoubtedly met many obstacles from Charles, who was planning the forcible subjugation of the Emperor. But the pope succeeded in persuading Charles to postpone for a year the expedition against Byzantium already decided on, and within that time he accomplished the union with the eastern church.
The envoys of Michael Palaeologus to the council, which was to be held in the French city of Lyons, passed safely through the dominions of Charles, who provided them with special safe conducts and provisions.51 At Lyons in 1274, the union was achieved between the pope and the representatives of Michael VIII. According to newly studied Vatican documents, this union led at once to negotiations between Gregory X and Michael VIII concerning a new anti-Turkish league. A cardinal of high rank went to Constantinople in the depth of winter. The date and place for a personal conference of the pope and the Emperor were immediately fixed: the two venerable personages were to meet on Easter Monday, 1276, at Brindisi or at Valona. But at the very beginning of that year, on January 6, the pope suddenly died, and the project came to nothing.52 Michael, however, felt that the union gave him the right to hope for papal support in his plans to reconquer the regions of the Balkan peninsula, which had formerly been under the power of the Empire. Accordingly he opened hostilities against the troops of Charles and his allies and met with great success, because Charles was at the time diverted by some difficulties with Genoa.
But after some friction with the pope, evoked by the union of Lyons, Charles succeeded in seating upon the papal throne one of his best friends, a Frenchman, Martin IV, who supported entirely the policy of the Sicilian king and broke the union with Michael. Then in 1281 a treaty was concluded between Charles, the titulary Latin Emperor, and Venice “for the recovery of the Empire of Romania which is under the sway of the Palaeologus” (ad recuperationem ejusdem Imperii Romaniae, quod detinetur per Paleologum).53 A vast coalition formed against Byzantium: the troops of the Latin possessions on the former territory of the Byzantine Empire, the troops of Italy and of Charles’ native France, the Venetian fleet, the papal forces, and the armies of the Serbs and Bulgars. The Byzantine Empire seemed to be on the brink of ruin, and Charles of Anjou, the “forerunner of Napoleon in the thirteenth century,”54 had world power in his grasp. A Greek author of the fourteenth century, Gregoras, wrote that Charles “was dreaming, if he took possession of Constantinople, of the whole monarchy of Julius Caesar and Augustus.”55 Sanudo, a western chronicler of the same time, said that Charles “was aspiring to world monarchy” (asperava alla monarchia del mondo).56 It was the most critical moment in Michael’s external policy. In 1281 Michael VIII opened negotiations with the Egyptian Sultan Qala’un concerning the military alliance “against the common enemy,” to wit against Charles of Anjou.56a
Deliverance to Byzantium came suddenly from the West, from Sicily, where on March 31, 1282 a revolt against French domination burst out; it spread rapidly all over the island and has become known in history as the Sicilian Vespers.57 Michael VIII had some part in this rebellion.
The Sicilian Vespers, one of the most important events in the early history of the political unification of Italy, always brings to mind a work of the famous Italian historian and patriot, Michele Amari, The War of the Sicilian Vespers. This book, written at the beginning of the fifth decade of the nineteenth century, has been edited many times and has formed the basis for scientific study of this problem. Of course, in Amari’s lifetime many of the sources were inaccessible, and Amari himself, gradually becoming acquainted with new discoveries in the field, made changes and corrections in the later editions of his book. A new stimulus to the study of this problem was given by the celebration in Sicily, in 1882, of the six hundredth anniversary of the Sicilian Vespers, when a great number of new publications appeared. An enormous mass of fresh and important documents has already been published, and more are still being published from the Angevin archive at Naples and the Vatican at Rome, as well as from the Spanish archives. The Sicilian Vespers, which at first sight seems to be an event of western European history, has its part also in the history of Byzantium.
Before Amari’s work came out, it was usually thought that the chief creator and leader of the Sicilian revolution of 1282 was a Sicilian exile, Giovanni Procida (Prochida, Prochyta) who, motivated by personal revenge, entered into negotiations with Peter of Aragon, the Byzantine Emperor, Michael VIII, the representatives of the Sicilian nobility, and others; that he won all of them over to his side and thus raised the revolt. The great humanist of the fourteenth century, Petrarca, regarded Procida as the chief mover of the revolution.58 But on investigation of the sources Amari showed that this account is a legendary development of historical fact, which, among the causes of the Sicilian revolution, has only secondary significance.59
The Sicilian people felt bitter anger against the severe French domination. The arrogant attitude of the French to the subject population and the terrible taxes which were levied, especially in connection with Charles’ expensive and difficult expedition against Byzantium, were the chief causes of the revolt of March 31. The two best politicians of that time, exclusive of Charles, Michael VIII and Peter of Aragon, skillfully used the discontent of the Sicilian population. Peter, related to the former king of Sicily, Manfred, the natural son of Frederick II Hohenstaufen, could not become reconciled to the excessive power of Charles, and felt he was within his rights in taking possession of Sicily. Michael VIII made use of Peter’s ambition, and promised him a subsidy if he opened hostilities against Charles. In Italy the imperial party, the Ghibellines, and a portion of the Sicilian nobility sided with Peter. Giovanni Procida was an intermediary in all these negotiations, but no more than that.
The revolt was crowned with success. Upon the invitation of the Sicilians, in August of the same year, Peter of Aragon landed on the island and was crowned with Manfred’s crown at Palermo. The attempts of Charles, who had returned from the East where hostilities against Byzantium were going on, to reconquer Sicily and to expel Peter of Aragon were unsuccessful. Charles was forced to give up his plans against the Empire of Michael VIII. Thereafter Charles was king only of southern Italy. The importance to Byzantium of the Sicilian Vespers, which deprived Charles of Sicily and saved the Eastern Empire from fatal danger, is obvious. In addition, the events connected with the revolution of 1282 laid the foundation for friendly relations between the Byzantine emperors and the kings of Aragon. Since Michael had supported Peter of Aragon with subsidies, he accordingly took part in the settlement of the Sicilian problem. In his autobiography Michael VIII, speaking of Charles’ expedition against his Empire, remarked, “The Sicilians disdaining the rest of Charles’ force as despicable, dared to raise arms and free themselves from slavery; therefore, if I said that God who granted freedom to them, granted it through us, I should tell the truth.”60
The Sicilian Vespers greatly affected the position of Pope Martin IV. It was not only an unheard-of innovation that, as the historian Ranke wrote, “the people, despite the commands of Rome, had dared to set a king over themselves,”61 but the events of 1282 undermined the foundations of the Byzantine policy of this pope, who had broken with the Union of Lyons, sided wholly with the eastern plans of Charles of Anjou, and hoped for the Latin occupation of Constantinople. The Sicilian Vespers made that impossible, for it dismembered and weakened the south-Italian kingdom of Charles which hitherto had been the chief basis for the western aggressive policy against Byzantium.
The revolution of 1282 had a repercussion on the policy of Venice who, a year before, had bound herself by an alliance with Charles against Byzantium. Learning of the rising in Sicily and foreseeing the fall of Charles’ power and the defeat of his eastern plans, the Republic of St. Mark rapidly changed her policy; realizing that Charles could be of no more use to her, she broke with him, formed closer relations with Byzantium, and three years later concluded a treaty of friendship with Michael’s successor, Andronicus the Elder. Moreover, Venice also established relations with Peter of Aragon.
Thus the international relations of the times and the discontent of Sicily, of which Michael VIII took advantage, saved Byzantium from the fatal danger that menaced her from the powerful Charles of Anjou.
Eastern policy of Michael VIII.—The Emperors of Nicaea and, after the restoration of Constantinople, Michael VIII, turned their main forces to the West for the recovery of the Balkan peninsula, and to the exhausting struggle with Charles of Anjou, which practically decided the destiny of the restored Empire. The eastern border was somewhat neglected, and the Byzantine government seems sometimes to have forgotten the threatening danger there. A Byzantine historian of the fifteenth century, George Phrantzes, wrote: “Under Michael Palaeologus, because of the wars in Europe against the Italians, the Roman Empire has been exposed to dangers in Asia from the Turks.”62 Of course, the Turkish danger to Byzantium had begun much earlier; but this observation of the historian well emphasizes a distinct feature of the eastern policy under Michael VIII. It was fortunate for the Empire that in the thirteenth century the Turks themselves were living through a troubled epoch owing to the military successes of the Mongols.
In the thirties and forties of the thirteenth century the threatening danger of the Mongol invasion appeared from the East. The Seljuq Sultanate of Rum or Iconium, bordering on the eastern part of the Empire of Nicaea, had been defeated by the Mongols. In the second half of the thirteenth century, at the time of Michael VIII, the last Seljucids were the mere deputies of the Mongols of Persia, whose dominions extended from India to the Mediterranean, and at whose head stood Hulagu, acknowledging the khan of the eastern Mongols as his overlord. In 1258 Hulagu took Bagdad, where the last Abbasid caliph suffered a violent death. After that he invaded and devastated Syria, Mesopotamia, and the surrounding lands, and meditated a march on Jerusalem and then probably a campaign against Egypt. But the news of the death of the Mongol Great Khan Mangu forced him to give up his aggressive plans in the south. The Mongol dynasty established in Persia was, in the last decades of the thirteenth century, an ally of the Christians against the Muhammedans. As a recent historian said, “Hulagu led the Nestorian [i.e., Christian] Turks of Central Asia on a real Yellow Crusade (Croisade Jaune) against Islam.”63 Finally, in 1260, the Mongol army was crushed by the Egyptian Mamluks, at Ain-Jalut. Another very powerful Mongol state was at that time established in the north, in Russia. This was the Golden or Kipchak Horde with its capital at Sarai, on the lower Volga. Realizing the great importance of this new Mongol factor in the international life of his epoch, Michael Palaeologus tried to make use of it several times in his external policy.64
In this connection it is important to remember that the Mamluk (Mameluke) dynasty established in Egypt in 1250 was united ethnographically with south Russia. The word Mamluk means “owned,” “belonging to,” “slave,” and the Mamluks in Egypt were originally the bodyguard of Turkish slaves first formed there under the successors of Saladin; in 1260 these “slaves” seized the throne, and they reigned over Egypt from 1260 to 1517, when Egypt was conquered by the Ottoman Turks. From the third decade of the thirteenth century on, the chief contingent of the Mamluk bodyguard consisted of the Turkish tribe of Cumans (Polovtzi) from southern Russia, who had fled before the Mongol invasion or had been taken captives and sold into slavery.65 A Byzantine historian says that the Mamluks were drawn from “the European Scythians dwelling near the Maeotis (the Sea of Azov) and the river of Tanais (Don).”66
Thus, owing to the Cuman origin of many Mamluks, they were interested in maintaining and developing relations with their compatriots of south Russia, where, even after the Mongol conquest, a considerable number of Cumans (Polovtzi) were left. Besides, the khan of the Golden (Kipchak) Horde had embraced Islam, and the sultan of Egypt, Mameluk Beybars, was also a Muslim, while Hulagu was a Shamanist, i.e., a pagan,67 and an enemy of Islam. Deadly rivalry, not only political but also religious, existed between Hulagu and Berke (Bereke), khan of the Golden Horde.
The land route between the Mamluks and Kipchaks was blocked by the dominions of Hulagu. Communication by sea between Egypt and south Russia was possible only through the Hellespont, Bosphorus, and Black Sea; but both straits were in the power of the Byzantine Emperor, so that the Mamluks needed special permission from Michael Palaeologus to use them.68 Accordingly the sultan of Egypt, “willing to be a friend of the Romans and to have permission for the Egyptian merchants to sail through our straits [the Hellespont and Bosphorus] once a year,” sent his envoys to Michael Palaeologus.69 The difficulty was that at that time Michael was on friendly terms with Hulagu, head of the Mongols in Persia; therefore the Egyptian ambassadors were from time to time retained at Constantinople. In 1265 the Kipchak Khan Berke declared war against Michael, and in this war the Bulgarian Tsar Constantine Tech (Tich) took part on the side of the Mongols, under Berke’s general Nogai. The Mongols (Tartars) and Bulgarians vanquished the Byzantine troops. After this defeat Michael was forced to abandon Hulagu and to join the Kipchak-Egyptian combination.70 To win over the powerful Nogai Michael gave him his illegitimate daughter to wife, and in the following war with the Bulgarian king, Constantine Tech, Michael was so actively supported by his son-in-law that the Bulgarian king was forced to stop hostilities.71 Diplomatic relations between the Golden Horde, Egypt, and Byzantium existed during Michael’s whole reign.72 The friendly relations between Michael Palaeologus towards the end of his reign and the sultan of Egypt, Mamluk Qala’un (1279–90) are very interesting. A common danger urged both monarchs to come to an agreement, for the ambitious plans of Charles of Anjou menaced both empires. These relations were apparently to lead to the conclusion of a formal treaty of friendship and commerce, which according to the French scholar M. Canard was actually concluded in 1281 but according to the German scholar F. Dölger did not go beyond the stage of diplomatic negotiations. The fall of Charles of Anjou and the Sicilian Vespers entirely altered the situation both in the West and in the East.73
In Asia Minor Michael Palaeologus was not particularly menaced. Although he had broken with Hulagu, the Persian Mongols were too much preoccupied with their internal troubles to take any decisive steps against Byzantium. As for the sultanate of Rum, it was a mere dependency of the Mongol Empire. Still, separate Turkish bodies of troops, sometimes real predatory bands, regardless of any treaties formerly concluded between the emperors and sultans, ceaselessly invaded the Byzantine territory, and penetrated into the interior of the country, sacking cities, hamlets, and monasteries, and murdering and taking captive the people.
Beginning with the time of the Arabian power, Byzantium had established on the eastern border of Asia Minor a line of fortified places, especially in the mountain passes (clisurae), and, besides the regular troops, had organized a peculiar sort of defenders of the outermost borders of the Empire, called akritai. Gradually, along with the advance of the Turks toward the west, the border line with its defenders, akritai, was also being pushed back to the west, so that in the thirteenth century they were concentrated chiefly in the mountains of the Bithynian Olympus, that is to say, in the northwestern corner of Asia Minor. In the epoch of Nicaea these border settlers, provided with land, exempted from taxes and contributions, and enjoying great wealth, had had only to render military service and to defend the border from enemies, and, as far as one may judge from the sources, they had defended it courageously and energetically. But after the capital was transferred from Nicaea to Constantinople, the akritai ceased to receive the support formerly given by the government, which, in its new center, felt itself less dependent upon the eastern border. Moreover Michael Palaeologus, attempting financial reform, took an official census of the wealth of the akritai and confiscated to the treasury the greater part of their land, from which they drew their incomes. This measure undermined the economic prosperity of the Bithynian akritai, on which their military readiness depended, and who were “the nerves of war,”74 and left the eastern border of the Empire almost defenseless. The government quelled the revolt raised by the akritai and refrained from exterminating them completely only from fear of opening the way to the Turks. Influenced by the Russian scholar, V. I. Lamansky, several other scholars have considered the Bithynian akritai Slavs.75 But more probably they were representatives of various peoples among whom may have been the descendants of the Slavs who had long ago settled in Bithynia. The external policy of Michael VIII, so strongly influenced by the imperialistic policy of Charles of Anjou, had a bad effect upon the eastern border.
The results of Michael’s enforced eastern policy were felt when the Turks, after a period of troubles and disintegration, were unified and strengthened by the Ottoman Turks; they were to deal the final blow to Byzantium and destroy the eastern Christian Empire.
The external policy of Byzantium during the reigns of the Andronicoi
The external policy of Andronicus II and Andronicus III, grandfather and grandson, differed from that of their predecessor, Michael VIII. A great danger had menaced Michael from the West, from Charles to Anjou; but the Sicilian Vespers had removed that danger forever in the year of Michael’s death. The Turks had been prevented by their own troubles from making adequate use of their advantageous position on the eastern border of the Empire.
Andronicus II and Andronicus III had to face two new and strong foes: Serbia in the Balkan peninsula and the Ottoman Turks in Asia Minor. Like Charles of Anjou, the rulers of these two peoples had set as their definite goal in the struggle with Byzantium, the complete destruction of the Empire and the formation on its site of either a Greco-Slavonic or a Greco-Turkish Empire. Charles’ plan to establish the Greco-Latin Empire had failed. In the fourteenth century the great king of Serbia, Stephen Dushan (Dušan), seemed to be on the point of establishing a great Slavonic empire. But for many reasons only the Ottoman Turks were to succeed in carrying out this plan: in the middle of the fifteenth century they were to establish an enormous empire, not only Greco-Turkish, but Greco-Slavo-Turkish, controlling both the Serbs and the Bulgars.
The Ottoman Turks.—The rise of the Ottoman Turks was the chief phenomenon in the East in the epoch of the two Andronicoi. Advancing toward Asia Minor, the Mongols had pushed back to the West, from the Persian province of Khorasan (Khurasan), a Turkish horde of the tribe of Ghuzz, who had come into the territory of the sultanate of Iconium, and been allowed by the sultan to stay and pasture their herds. After the defeat inflicted by the Mongols the Kingdom of the Seljuqs divided into several independent possessions (emirates) with separate dynasties, which harassed the Empire severely. Along with this disintegration of the Empire of the Seljuqs, the Turkish horde of Ghuzz also became independent. At the very end of the thirteenth century their leader was Osman (Othman), who began the dynasty of the Ottomans and gave his name to the Turks who were under his control; from that time on they were called the Ottoman Turks. The dynasty founded by Osman ruled in Turkey until 1923.76
From the end of the thirteenth century on, the Ottoman Turks began to harass seriously the small possessions in Asia Minor which still remained in the power of Byzantium. The imperial troops held with difficulty the three most important points in Asia Minor: Brusa, Nicaea, and Nicomedia. The co-emperor Michael IX was sent against the Turks and defeated. Constantinople itself seemed in danger, and the Emperor “seemed to sleep or be dead.”77
The Spanish (Catalan) companies in the East.—Andronicus could not master the situation without foreign aid, and he got such aid from the Spanish mercenary bands, the so-called “Catalan companies,” or “almughavars.”78 Mercenary bands of various nationalities, under the name of “companies,” which lived only for war and would fight for pay for anyone against anyone, were very well known in the latter half of the Middle Ages. “The Catalan companies,” which consisted not only of Catalans, but also of the inhabitants of Aragon, Navarre, the island of Majorca, and other places, fought as mercenaries on the side of Peter of Aragon during the war which burst out after the Sicilian Vespers. When at the very beginning of the fourteenth century a peace was concluded between Sicily and Naples, the Catalans were out of work. Such allies, accustomed to war, pillage, and violence, became in time of peace dangerous to those who had invited them, and who now tried to get rid of them. Moreover, the companies themselves, finding no satisfaction in peaceful living conditions, sought new opportunities for activity. The Catalans chose for leader Roger de Flor, a German by origin, whose father’s surname, Blum (i.e. a flower), was translated into Spanish as “Flor.”
With the consent of his companions Roger, who spoke Greek fluently, offered his services to Andronicus II for his struggle with the Seljuq and Ottoman Turks and extorted from the hard pressed Emperor unheard-of conditions: the insolent adventurer demanded the consent of Andronicus to his marriage with the Emperor’s niece, the granting of the title of megadukas (admiral), and a large sum of money for his company. Andronicus was compelled to yield, and the Spanish companies took ship and sailed for Constantinople.
The participation of the Spaniards in the destinies of Byzantium is narrated in detail both in the Spanish (Catalan) sources and in the Greek. But while a participant of the expedition, the Catalan chronicler Muntaner79 described Roger and his companions as courageous and noble fighters for a right cause, a credit to their country, Greek historians consider the Catalans pillagers and insolent ruffians, and one of them exclaimed: “Would that Constantinople had never seen the Latin Roger!”80 Historians of the nineteenth century devoted much attention to the Catalan expedition. A Spanish investigator of the problem compared their deeds with those of the famous Spanish conquerors of Mexico and Peru in the sixteenth century, Cortez and Pizarro; he does not know “what other people may plume themselves on such a historical event as our glorious expedition to the East,” and he considered the expedition an eternal testimony to the glory of the Spanish race.81 The German historian Hopf declared that “the Catalan expedition is the most attractive episode in the history of the Empire of the Palaeologi,” especially on account of its dramatic interest.82 Finlay wrote that the Catalans “guided by a sovereign like Leo III or like Basil II, might have conquered the Seljuq Turks, strangled the Ottoman power in its cradle, and carried the double-headed eagle of Byzantium victorious to the foot of Mount Taurus and to the banks of the Danube.”83Elsewhere the same historian remarked: “The expedition of the Catalans in the East is a wonderful instance of the success which sometimes attends a career of rapacity and crime, in opposition to all the ordinary maxims of human prudence.”84 The Spanish archives still afford much new information on this expedition.
At the very beginning of the fourteenth century Roger de Flor with his company arrived in Constantinople.85 There were almost ten thousand members of the expedition; but this number included wives, mistresses, and children. The marriage of Roger to the Emperor’s niece was celebrated at Constantinople with great pomp. After some serious conflicts in the capital between the Catalans and Genoese, who, jealous for their exceptional privileges in the Empire, felt the newcomers their rivals, the company was finally transported into Asia Minor, where the Turks were besieging the large city of Philadelphia, east of Smyrna. Supported by a band of imperial troops the small Hispano-Byzantine army, under Roger de Flor, freed Philadelphia from the Turkish siege. The victory of the western mercenaries was enthusiastically received in the capital; some men thought that the Turkish danger to the Empire was over forever. The first success was followed by others against the Turks in Asia Minor. But the unbearable extortions and arbitrary cruelties of the Catalans towards the local population, on one hand, and the clearly expressed intention of Roger to establish in Asia Minor a principality of his own, though under the Emperor’s suzerainty, on the other, strained the relations between the mercenaries, the people of Asia Minor, and the government of Constantinople. The Emperor recalled Roger to Europe, and the latter with his company crossed the Hellespont and occupied first an important fortress on the straits of Gallipoli, and then the whole peninsula of Gallipoli. The new negotiations between Roger and the Emperor ended in Roger’s obtaining the title next to the Emperor’s, that of Caesar, never till then borne by a foreigner. Before marching again to Asia Minor the new Caesar went with a small band to Hadrianople, where the eldest son of Andronicus, the co-emperor Michael IX, resided. On Michael’s instigation, Roger and his companions were slain during a festival. When these tidings spread among the population of the Empire, the Spaniards in the capital and other cities were also murdered.
The Catalans, who were concentrated at Gallipoli, inflamed and thirsty for revenge, broke their obligations as allies of the Empire and set out to the West, ravaging with fire and sword the regions through which they passed. Thrace and Macedonia were terribly devastated. Not even monasteries on Mount Athos were spared. An eyewitness, a pupil of Daniel, igumen (abbot) of the Serbian monastery of Chilandarion, on Mount Athos, wrote: “It was horror to see then the desolation of the Holy Mountain by the hands of enemies.”86 The Catalans also burned the Russian monastery of St. Panteleemon, on Mount Athos, but their assault on Thessalonica failed. In retaliation for the Catalan devastations Andronicus commanded the merchandise of some Catalan vessels in the Byzantine waters seized and the merchants themselves arrested.87
After having stayed some time in Thessaly, the Catalans marched to the south, through the famous pass of Thermopylae, into middle Greece to the territory of the Duchy of Athens and Thebes, which had been founded after the Fourth Crusade and was under French control. In the spring of 1311 there took place a battle in Boeotia, at the river of the Cephisus, near the Lake of Copais (near the modern village of Skripù). The Catalans won a decisive victory over the French troops. Putting an end to the flourishing French duchy of Athens and Thebes, they established there Spanish control which lasted for eighty years. The church of the Holy Virgin, the ancient Parthenon on the Acropolis, passed into the hands of the Catalan clergy, who were impressed by its sublimity and riches. In the second half of the fourteenth century a Spanish duke of Athens called the Acropolis “the most precious jewel that exists in the world, and such as all the kings of Christendom together would imitate in vain.”88
The Athenian Duchy of the Catalans established by mere accident in the fourteenth century and organized upon Spanish or Sicilian models, has generally been considered a harsh, oppressive, and destructive government, which at Athens and in Greece in general has left very few material traces of its domination. On the Acropolis, for instance, the Catalans carried out some changes, especially in the disposition of the fortifications, but no traces of them remain. But in Greek popular tradition and in the Greek tongue there still linger reminiscences of the cruelty and injustice of the Spanish invaders. Even today, in some regions of Greece, for example, in the island of Euboea, a man in condemnation of illegal or unjust action may say: “Not even the Catalans would have done that.” In Acarnania to the present day the word “Catalan” is the synonym for “savage, robber, criminal.” At Athens the word “Catalan” is considered an insult. In some cities of the Peloponnesus, when one wishes to say that a woman possesses a bad character, one says, “She must be a Catalan woman.”89
But recently much new material, especially in the Archives of Barcelona (the archives de la Corona d’Aragó), has come to light which shows that the conception of former historians on this subject was biased. The years of the Catalan domination in middle Greece in the fourteenth century were not only troubled and destructive; they were productive. The Acropolis, which was called in Catalan Castell de Cetines, was fortified; for the first time since the closing of the Athenian school by Justinian the Great, a university was established at Athens.90 Catalan fortifications were also erected in middle and northern Greece.91 A modern Catalan historian, the best recent authority on the Catalan problem in Middle Greece, A. Rubió y Lluch, declared, “The discovery of a Catalan Greece is, in our opinion, one of the most unexpected surprises the modern investigators have had in the history of medieval political life.”92 Of course, the full story of the Catalan dominion in Greece remains to be learned; but we must realize that the older works and former opinions on this problem of many very eminent scholars must be rectified, and that a new history of the Catalan dominion in Greece must be told on the basis of new material.93 The Navarrese invasion in 1379 dealt a death blow to the Catalan dominion in Greece.
Successes of the Turks in Asia Minor.—At the very beginning of the fourteenth century the Catalan company fought successfully against the Ottoman Turks. But these military successes did not last long. The bloody advance of the Catalan companies through the Balkan peninsula, after Roger de Flor’s murder, and the internal strife between the two Andronicoi, grandfather and grandson diverted the forces and attention of the Empire from the eastern border. The Ottomans seized their advantage, and in the last years of Andronicus the Elder and in the reign of Andronicus the Younger won some important successes in Asia Minor. The sultan Othman (Osman) and after him his son Orkhan conquered there the chief Byzantine cities, Brusa, Nicaea, and Nicomedia, and then reached the coast of the Sea of Marmora. Several cities of the western coast of Asia Minor began to pay tribute to the Turks. In 1341, when Andronicus III died, the Ottoman Turks had already become the real masters of Asia Minor, with the obvious intention of transferring hostilities into the European territory of the Empire and even threatening Constantinople itself; Thrace was exposed to continuous incursions from them. Meanwhile, the Seljuq emirates, fearing danger from the Ottomans, entered into friendly relations with the Empire in order to struggle against both the Latins and the Ottomans.
Byzantium and the rise of Serbia; Stephen Dushan (Dušan).—The possessions of Byzantium in the Balkan peninsula, at the end of the thirteenth century, embraced the whole of Thrace and southern Macedonia with Thes-salonica; but the lands lying farther to the west and south—Thessaly, Epirus, and Albania—only partially recognized the power of the Empire, and not in equal degree. In the Peloponnesus the Empire under Michael Palaeologus had reconquered from the Franks Laconia in the southeast of the peninsula, and then the central province, Arcadia. In the rest of the Peloponnesus and middle Greece the Latins continued to rule. As to the Archipelago, Byzantium possessed only a few islands in the northern and northeastern portion of the sea.
Parallel with the Ottoman danger in the East, another threatening danger to Byzantium was growing up in the Balkan peninsula, in the first half of the fourteenth century, from Serbia.
The Serbs and the closely related, perhaps even identical, Croats made their appearance in the Balkan peninsula in the seventh century at the time of Emperor Heraclius and occupied the western part of the peninsula. While the Croats dwelling in Dalmatia and in the region between the rivers Sava and Drava began to enter into closer relations with the West, adopted Catholicism, and in the eleventh century lost their independence and came under the power of the Hungarian (Magyar) Kingdom, the Serbs remained faithful to Byzantium and the eastern church. For a long time, that is, up to the second half of the twelfth century, in contrast to the Bulgars the Serbs failed to form one unified state. They lived in independent districts or župy, at the head of which were župans. A tendency towards unification did not appear among the Serbs until the twelfth centurv, and coincided chronologically with the Bulgarian movement towards the foundation of the second Bulgarian Kingdom. Just as the Asen family led the movement in Bulgaria, so the family of the Nemanjas played a similar role in Serbia.
The founder of the Serbian monarchy in the second half of the twelfth century was Stephen Nemanja, proclaimed “Great Župan,” the first to unify the Serbians by the power of his family. Thanks to successful wars with Byzantium and the Bulgars, he considerably increased the Serbian territory; then, having carried out his political task, he abdicated and ended his days as a monk in a monastery on Mount Athos. During the Third Crusade Stephen Nemanja entered into negotiations with the German king, Frederick Barbarossa, who at that time was on his way across the Balkan peninsula, and offered him an alliance against the Byzantine emperor, if Frederick would allow Serbia to annex Dalmatia and keep the regions taken from Byzantium. These negotiations came to nothing.
THE DECLINE OF THE BYZANTINE EMPIRE IN THE FOURTEENTH AND FIFTEENTH CENTURIES
The map at top left shows the territory occupied by the Serbs and Bulgarians in the fourteenth century, and the invasions they made into the Byzantine Empire during that century. The expansion of the Turks westward from 1354 to 1402 is illustrated in the map at lower left. The map above shows the areas controlled in the fifteenth century by the Venetians, Genoese, Franks, and Catalans and shows the boundaries of the Duchy of Naxos. Studied together with the boundaries of the Byzantine Empire in 1340, 1350, and 1402 (see endpaper map), these maps show the gradual limitation of territory which preceded the fall of the Empire in 1453. The general areas in these maps are modified from the maps in Ostrogorsky, Geschichte des byzantinischen Staates.
After a civil war between the sons of Stephen Nemanja, his son Stephen became ruler of the state and was crowned in 1217 by a papal legate. After the coronation he became King of Serbia and is known as the “first-crowned” King (Kral), “of all Serbia.” During his reign, the Serbian church received from the hands of the papal representative an independent head in the person of a Serbian archbishop. But the dependence of Serbia on the Roman church was short, and the new Kingdom remained faithful to the Eastern Orthodox church.
The Latin Empire, in endeavoring to increase its influence in the Balkan peninsula, met with a great obstacle in the two Slavonic states, Bulgaria and Serbia. But after the fall of the Latin Empire in 1261 circumstances changed; the Latin Empire was replaced by the weak restored Byzantine Empire, and at about the same time Bulgaria, also weakened by internal troubles and reduced in territory, had little of its former strength. After 1261 Serbia became the most important state in the Balkan peninsula. But the Serbian kings committed a strategic error in failing to annex the western Serbian (Croatian) land; without having achieved national unification, they turned their attention to Constantinople.
During the civil war between the two Andronicoi, the Serbian “Kral” (King) supported the grandfather. The victory of the Serbs in 1330 over the Bulgars, who were allies of Andronicus III, near Velbužd (now Köstendil), in Upper Macedonia, had great significance for the future of Serbia. The young prince, Stephen Dushan (Dušan), destined to be the famous king of Serbia, is believed, despite some discrepancy of sources,94 to have had a decisive share in the victory. In his flight the Bulgarian king was unhorsed and slain. The results of the battle at Velbužd were of great importance to the young Serbian Kingdom. The Greco-Bulgarian alliance was dissolved, and any possibility that Bulgaria might restrain the further rise of Serbia was destroyed forever. Thereafter the Kingdom of Serbia played the leading role in the Balkan peninsula.
But Serbia reached the climax of her power under Stephen Dushan, 1331–55. Ten years before he mounted the throne, Stephen and his father had been crowned together with the benediction of the archbishop. Sources call him, therefore, “Stephen, the young Kral (King),” “rex juvenis,” in opposition to “the old Kral,” “rex veteranus.” T. Florinsky commented, “this simultaneous coronation of father and son was a new and remarkable phenomenon in the history of Serbia. It showed clearly the influence of Byzantium, where it was an old custom of the emperors to appoint their co-rulers and have them crowned with the imperial title.”95
During the first ten years of his rule, while Andronicus III reigned in Byzantium, Stephen Dushan took advantage of the fact that the Emperor and John Cantacuzene were occupied in the east by the Ottoman danger, to open his aggressive policy, on one hand, by the annexation of northern Macedonia, and on the other, by the occupation of the major part of Albania, where Andronicus’ troops had recently fought with success. Before the death of the Emperor in 1341, Stephen Dushan, though he had not fully developed his plans against Byzantium, nevertheless had already shown how strong an enemy he was to prove to the Empire.
Advance of the Albanians to the south.—In the first half of the fourteenth century, the Albanians for the first time began to play a considerable part in the history of the Balkan peninsula. Both Andronicus III and Stephen Dushan fought with them.
Albania had never, from the time of classical antiquity, been able to form a single unified nation, and the history of the Albanians had always been a part of the history of some foreign people. Internally they were divided into small principalities and autonomous mountain tribes, and their interests were exclusively local. “Albania abounds in ancient remains which as yet have been unexplored. The history of Albania cannot, therefore, be written in its proper and final form without reference to the precious relics the Albanian soil has jealously guarded for centuries. It is only when these archeological treasures come to light that a really scientific history of Albania can be written.”96
The ancestors of the Albanians were the ancient Illyrians, who dwelled along the eastern coast of the Adriatic Sea, from Epirus as far north as Pannonia. The Greek geographer of the second century A.D., Ptolemy, mentioned an Albanian tribe with a city of Albanopolis. The name of these Albanians was in the eleventh century extended to the rest of the ancient Illyrians. This people was called in Greek, Albanoi, Arbanoi, or Albanitai, Arbanitai; in Latin, Arbanenses or Albanenses; from the Latin or Roman form comes the Slavonic Arbanasi, in modern Greek Arvanitis, in Turkish Arnaut. The Albanians also call themselves Arber or Arben. Later on there appeared a new name for the Albanians, Shkipetars, the etymological origin of which has not been definitely fixed.97 The Albanian language is now full of Roman elements, beginning with the ancient Latin language and ending with the Venetian dialect, so that some specialists call the Albanian tongue “a half-Romance mixed-language” (halbromanishe Mischsprache).98 Of old the Albanians were a Christian people. In the earlier Byzantine time, Emperor Anastasius I, who came from the chief Illyrian coast city of Dyrrachium (Durazzo), may have been Albanian. An Albanian origin for the family of Justinian the Great is also possible.
Great ethnographic changes occurred in the Albanian population in the epoch of the so-called barbarian invasions of the fourth and fifth centuries, and of the gradual occupation of the peninsula by the Slavs. Later, the Albanians (not yet called in the sources by this name) were subject first to Byzantium, then to the Great Bulgaria of Simeon. For the first time, Albanian, as a general name for the whole people, appeared in the Byzantine sources of the eleventh century, after the Normano-Byzantine conflicts in the Balkan peninsula.99 In the epoch of the Latin Empire and of the first Palaeologi the Albanians were successively controlled by the Despotat of Epirus, the second Bulgarian Empire, the Emperor of Nicaea John Ducas Vatatzes, and finally, by Charles of Anjou, who styled himself “by the grace of God the King of Sicily and Albania.” In the fourth decade of the fourteenth century, not long before Andronicus’ death, the Serbian king Stephen Dushan conquered the major part of Albania.
At this time a strong movement of the Albanians towards the south began, at first into Thessaly, but extending later, in the second half of the fourteenth and in the fifteenth century, all over middle Greece, the Peloponnesus, and many islands of the Aegean Sea. This powerful stream of Albanian colonization is felt even today. A German scholar of the first half of the nineteenth century, Fallmerayer, came out with the astounding theory that the Greeks had been completely exterminated by the Slavs and Albanians; “not a single drop of pure Hellenic blood flows in the veins of the Christian population of modern Greece.” He wrote in the second volume of his History of the Peninsula of Morea in the Middle Ages, that, beginning with the second quarter of the fourteenth century, the Greek-Slavs who inhabited Greece were displaced and crushed by Albanian settlers, so that, in his opinion, the Greek revolution of the nineteenth century which freed Greece from the Turkish yoke, was in reality the work of Albanian hands. Fallmerayer journeyed through Greece and found in Attica, Boeotia, and the major part of the Peloponnesus a very great number of Albanian settlers, who sometimes did not even understand Greek. If one calls this country a new Albania, wrote the same author, one gives it its real name. Those provinces of the Greek Kingdom are no more closely related to Hellenism than the Scottish Highlands are to the Afghan regions of Kandahar and Kabul.100
Although Fallmerayer’s theory as a whole is rejected, it is true that even today many islands of the Archipelago and almost all Attica as far as Athens are Albanian. According to the approximate statistics made by scholars, the Albanians in the Peloponnesus number now more than twelve per cent of the whole population (about 92,500 souls).101 In 1854 J. G. Hahn, the author of a German work Albanian Studies, estimated that “of a total of one million inhabitants of Greece, about 173,000 were Albanians,” and a modern writer remarked: “No changes have occurred in the meantime to alter their position.”102
Thus, the time of Andronicus III was marked by the beginning of Albanian colonization to the south in Greece as far as the Peloponnesus, and of an important ethnographical alteration among the population of the Greek peninsula.
Venice and Genoa.—Michael VIII’s government gave undoubted preference to Genoa in the rivalry between the two western commercial republics, Venice and Genoa. In connection with political conditions, he then restored friendly relations with Venice, making skillful use of the antagonism between the two republics. Andronicus II continued his father’s policy of privileges for Genoa, so that causes for conflict between Genoa and Venice continued to exist.
Towards the end of the thirteenth century all Christian possessions in Syria were lost. In 1291 the Muhammedans took away from the Christians their last important coast city, Acre (Acca, ancient Ptolemaïs); all the rest of the coast cities surrendered to the Muhammedans almost without struggle. All Syria and Palestine passed into the possession of the Muhammedans.
This event was a terrible blow to Venice, for by it she lost the whole southeast Mediterranean, where her trade for a long time had been predominant. On the other hand, the Genoese, with a solid footing on the Bosphorus, extended their influence in the Black Sea, where apparently they hoped for a trade monopoly. This was of particular importance in the Crimea, where both Venetians and Genoese colonies had already been established. Realizing the threatening danger to her commercial power Venice declared war on Genoa. Many of the hostilities took place on the territory or in the waters of the Byzantine Empire. The Venetian fleet breaking through the Hellespont and the Marmora sea pillaged and burnt the shores of the Bosphorus and the suburb of Galata, where the Genoese dwelt. The Genoese colony found safety behind the walls of Constantinople, whose Emperor actively supported the Genoese. The Venetians who lived in the capital were murdered. The Genoese obtained from Andronicus II an authorization to surround Galata with a wall and moat. Soon after, their quarters were embellished with many public and private buildings. At the head of the colony stood a podestá appointed from Genoa, who governed on the basis of certain regulations and had charge of the interests of all the Genoese who lived on the territory of the Empire. Thus, said T. Florinsky, “along with the orthodox Tsargrad there arose a small, but well fortified, Latin city with a Genoese podestá, republican organization, and Latin churches and monasteries. Genoa, besides its commercial significance, acquired great political importance in the Empire.”103 Towards the time of the ascension of Andronicus III Galata became a sort of state within the state, and by the end of his reign this situation was very strongly felt. No real peace between Genoa and Venice was possible.
Besides these two most powerful commercial republics there was considerable trade activity at Constantinople, at the end of the thirteenth and in the fourteenth century on the part of some other western cities which had their colonies there—for example, of Italy, Pisa, Florence, and Ancona—of the Adriatic Sea the Slavonic Ragusa (Dubrovnik),104 and several south-French cities, like Marseilles.
The reigns of the two Andronicoi, grandfather and grandson, came to sad conclusions. In the east the Ottoman Turks had become the masters of the situation in Asia Minor; in the Balkan peninsula Stephen Dushan had already obtained some real successes, which indicated his still broader plans for the future. The Catalan companies had terribly devastated many regions of the Empire in their march to the west. Finally, Genoese Galata, economically strong and politically almost independent, had established and fortified itself side by side with Constantinople.
John V (1341–1391), John VI Cantacuzene (1341–1354) and the apogee of Serbian power under Stephen Dushan
Under Andronicus III, John V’s predecessor, Stephen Dushan had already taken possession of northern Macedonia and the major part of Albania. With the ascension to the throne of the boy John V, when a devastating civil war began to tear the Empire, Dushan’s aggressive plans widened and took definite form against Constantinople itself. A Byzantine historian of the fourteenth century, Nicephorus Gregoras, put into the mouth of John Cantacuzene these words: “The great Serb (Stephen Dushan)105 like an overflowing river which has passed far beyond its banks, has already submerged one part of the Empire of Romania with its waves, and is threatening to submerge another.”106 Stephen Dushan came to an agreement, now with Cantacuzene, now with John V, as it seemed advantageous to him. Taking advantage of the desperate situation of the Empire, whose forces were occupied by internal troubles, Stephen conquered all of Macedonia except Thessalonica without difficulty and after a siege took Seres, an important fortified place in eastern Macedonia, lying on the way from Thessalonica to Constantinople. The surrender of Seres was of great importance; Dushan gained a fortified and purely Greek city, only slightly inferior to Thessalonica, which might serve as a key to Constantinople. From this time on, broader plans against the Empire developed in the mind of the Serbian leader.
Contemporary Byzantine sources connect with the capture of Seres Dushan’s assumption of the title of tsar and the open display of his claims to the Eastern Empire. John Cantacuzene, for example, wrote, “The Kral [King] approached Seres and took possession of it. … After that, becoming excessively conceited and seeing himself master of the major part of the Empire, he proclaimed himself Tsar of the Romans and Serbs,107 and upon his son he conferred the title of Kral.”108 In his letter to the Doge of Venice from Seres, Dushan, among other titles, glorifies himself as “the master of almost all the Empire of Romania” [et fere totius imperii Romaniae dominus].109 His Greek decrees Dushan signed in red ink “Stephen in Christ God the faithful Kral and autocrat of Serbia and Romania.”110
Dushan’s broad plans concerning Constantinople differed from the plans of the Bulgarian kings of the ninth and thirteenth centuries, Simeon and the Asens. The chief aim of Simeon had been the liberation of the Slavonic lands from the power of Byzantium and the formation of one great Slavonic Empire; “his very attempt,” wrote T. Florinsky, “to take possession of Constantinople was due to the same tendency to destroy the power of the Greeks and replace it by that of the Slavs…,”111 “He wished to possess Tsargrad and to exert power over the Greeks, not as emperor of the Romans, but as tsar of Bulgaria.”112 Similar aims were pursued by the Asens, who aspired to the liberation and complete independence of the Bulgarian people and wished to found a Bulgarian Empire which should include Constantinople.
In assuming the title of emperor (basileus) and autocrat Stephen Dushan was guided by different aims. The question was not only the liberation of the Serbian people from the influence of the eastern emperor. There is no doubt that Dushan set himself the goal ot creating a new empire instead of Byzantium, not Serbian, but Serbian-Greek, and that “the Serbian people, the Serbian kingdom, and all the Slavonic lands annexed to it were to become only a part of the Empire of the Romans, whose head he proclaimed himself.”113 Proposing himself as an aspirant to the throne of Constantine the Great, Justinian, and other Byzantine emperors, Dushan wished, first of all, to become emperor of the Romans, and then of the Serbs, that is, to establish in his person a Serbian dynasty on the Byzantine throne.
It was important for Dushan to draw to his side the Greek clergy of the conquered regions; he realized that, in the eyes of the people, his proclamation as tsar of the Serbs and Greeks would be legal only if sanctioned by the higher authority of the Church. The archbishop of Serbia, dependent upon the patriarch of Constantinople, was not sufficient; even though the complete independence of the Serbian church had been proclaimed, the archbishop or patriarch of Serbia could crown the kral (king) only as tsar of Serbia. In order to sanctify the title of the “Tsar of the Serbs and Romans,” which might help him to the Byzantine throne, something more was needed. The patriarch of Constantinople, naturally, would not consent to such a coronation. Dushan began to plan to sanctify his new title by the approbation of the highest Greek clergy of the conquered regions as well as by the monks of the Greek monasteries of the famous Mount Athos.
For this purpose he confirmed and widened the privileges and increased the endowments of the Greek monasteries in conquered Macedonia, where many estates (μετόχια) which belonged to Athos also came under his power. The peninsula of Chalcidice itself with the Athonian monasteries came into Dushan’s hands, and the monks could not fail to understand that the protection of the monasteries had passed from the Byzantine emperor to a new master, upon whom their further welfare would depend. The charters (chrysobulls) written in Greek granted by Dushan to the Greek monasteries of Athos testify not only to his confirmation of their former privileges, exemptions, and possessions, but to the granting of new ones. Besides the charters given to separate monasteries there is a general charter granted to all the Athonian monasteries; in this charter he said: “Our Majesty, having received (into our power) all the monasteries situated on the Holy Mountain of Athos, which from all their hearts have had recourse to us and have become subject to us, has granted and accorded to them by this general edict (chrysobull) a great benefaction in order that the monks dwelling therein may fulfil peacefully and without disturbance their pious work.”114
Easter 1346 brought a momentous day in the history of Serbia. At Scopia (Skoplje, Uskub, in northern Macedonia), Dushan’s capital, there assembled the noble princes of the whole kingdom of Serbia, all the higher Serbian clergy with the archbishop of Serbia at their head, the Bulgarian and Greek clergy of the conquered regions, and, finally, the protos, the head of the council of igumens (abbots), which administered Athos, and the igumens and hermits of the Holy Mountain of Athos. This large and solemn council was “to ratify and sanctify the political revolution achieved by Dushan: the foundation of a new Empire.”115
First of all, the Council established a Serbian patriarchate entirely independent from the Constantinopolitan patriarchate. Dushan needed an independent Serbian patriarch for his coronation as emperor. As the choice of that patriarch took place without the participation of the ecumenical patriarchs of the East, the Greek bishops and the hermits of Mount Athos had to substitute for the patriarch of Constantinople. The Serbian patriarch was elected, and the patriarch of Constantinople, who refused to recognize the acts of this council as regular, excommunicated the Church of Serbia.
After the election of the patriarch the solemn coronation of Dushan with the imperial crown was performed. This event had probably been preceded by the ceremony of the proclamation of Dushan as tsar at Seres, soon after this city was taken. In connection with those events Dushan introduced at his court pompous court dignities and adopted Byzantine customs and manners. The new basileus turned to the representatives of the Greek nobility; the Greek language seems to have become officially equal to the Serbian tongue, for many of Dushan’s charters were written in Greek. “The privileged classes in Serbia, large landowners and clergy, who had exerted enormous influence and power and limited the freedom of action of the Serbian kings, were now forced to yield to the higher authority of the Tsar, as an absolute monarch.”116 In accordance with Byzantine custom, Dushan’s wife was also crowned, and their ten year old son was proclaimed “Kral of all Serbian lands.” After the coronation, by means of many charters (chrysobulls) Dushan expressed his gratitude and favor to the Greek monasteries and churches, and with his wife visited Athos, where he stayed about four months, praying in all the monasteries, generously endowing them, and receiving everywhere “the benediction of the saintly and holy fathers, who led angelic lives.”117
After the coronation Stephen’s sole dream was to reach Constantinople; after his victories and coronation he could see no impediment to the attainment of this goal. Although in the last period of his reign his campaigns against Byzantium were not so frequent as before, and his attention was distracted now by hostilities in the west and north, now by internal affairs, nevertheless, as Florinsky said, “to all this Dushan’s attention only turns aside, no more: his eyes and thoughts are as before concentrated upon the same alluring extreme southeast corner of the peninsula. The desire of taking possession of this southeast corner, or, properly speaking, of the world city situated there, now holds still more firmly all the Tsar’s thoughts, becomes the leading motive of his activity, and characterizes the whole time of his reign.”118
Powerfully affected as he was by the dream of an easy conquest of Constantinople, Dushan did not immediately grasp the fact that some serious obstacles to the realization of his plan already existed. First, there was the growing power of the Turks, who were also aiming at the Byzantine capital and whom the badly organized Serbian troops could not overcome; besides, in order to take Constantinople it was necessary to have a fleet, which Dushan had not. To increase his maritime force he planned to enter into alliance with Venice, but this step was from the beginning doomed to failure. The Republic of St. Mark, unreconciled to the return of Constantinople to the Palaeologi, would never have consented to support Dushan in his conquest of the city for himself; if Venice conquered Constantinople, it would be for her own sake. The attempt of Dushan to form an alliance with the Turks also miscarried, due to the policy of John Cantacuzene; in any event the interests of Dushan and the Turks must undoubtedly have collided. Nor could interference in the internal strife of the Empire materially help Dushan’s plans. In the last years of his reign a body of Serbian troops fighting on the side of John V Palaeologus was slain by the Turks. Dushan was doomed to disappointment; it became obvious that the way to Constantinople was closed to him.
The statement in the later chronicles of Ragusa (Dubrovnik) that Dushan undertook a vast expedition against Constantinople in the very year of his death, which alone prevented its being carried into effect, is not confirmed by any contemporary information, and the best scholars do not consider it true.119 In 1355 the Great Master of Serbia died without realizing his ambition. Thus, Dushan failed to create a Greco-Serbian Empire to replace the Byzantine Empire; he managed to form only the Empire of Serbia, which included many Greek lands,120 but which after his death fell, as John Cantacuzene said, “into a thousand pieces.”121
The existence of Dushan’s monarchy was of such short duration, that, as Florinsky says, “in it, properly speaking, only two moments may be observed: the moment of formation during the whole time of Dushan’s reign, and that of disintegration, starting immediately after the death of its founder.”122 “Ten years after,” another Russian scholar wrote, “the grandeur of the Serbian Empire seemed to belong to a remote past.”123 Thus, the most grandiose attempt of the Slavs, their third and last, to create in the Balkan peninsula a great Empire, with Constantinople at its head, ended in failure. The Balkan peninsula was open and almost defenseless to the aggressive plans of the warlike Ottoman Turks.
The policies of Byzantium in the second half of the fourteenth century
The Turks.—Toward the end of the reign of Andronicus the Younger the Turks were almost in complete control of Asia Minor. The eastern portion of the Mediterranean and the Archipelago were continuously threatened by the vessels of Turkish pirates, both Ottomans and Seljuqs. The situation of the Christian population of the peninsula, coastlands, and islands became unbearable; trade died away. Turkish attacks on the Athonian monasteries forced one of the monks, Athanasius, to leave Athos and emigrate to Greece, to Thessaly, where he founded the famous monasteries “in air,” “the weirdly fantastic Metéora, which crown the needle-like crags of the grim valley of Kalabaka.”124 The king of Cyprus and the Master of the military order of the Hospitalers, or of St. John, who had held Rhodes since the beginning of the fourteenth century, besought the pope to rouse the western European states to take arms against the Turks. But the small relief expeditions which answered the papal appeals, though not altogether unsuccessful, could not accomplish much. The Turks were resolved to establish themselves firmly on the European coast; and this was facilitated by the civil war in the Empire, in which John Cantacuzene involved the Turks.
The first establishment of the Ottoman Turks in Europe is usually connected with the name of John Cantacuzene, who often called upon their support in his struggle with John Palaeologus. Cantacuzene even married his daughter to Sultan Orkhan. On the invitation of Cantacuzene the Turks as his allies devastated Thrace several times. Nicephorus Gregoras remarked that Cantacuzene hated the Romans as he loved the barbarians.125 It is quite possible that the first settlements of the Turks in the peninsula of Gallipoli took place with the knowledge and consent of Cantacuzene. The same Byzantine historian wrote that while a Christian service was being celebrated in the imperial church, the Ottomans who had been admitted into the capital were dancing and singing near the palace, “crying out in incomprehensible sounds the songs and hymns of Muhammed, and thereby attracting the crowd to listen to them rather than to the divine Gospels.”126 To satisfy the financial claims of the Turks Cantacuzene even handed over to them the money sent from Russia by the Great Prince of Moscow, Simeon the Proud, for the restoration of the Church of St. Sophia, at that time in a state of decay.
Although some private settlements of the Turks in Europe, namely in Thrace and the Thracian (Gallipoli) peninsula, had existed, in all likelihood, from the first years of the reign of Cantacuzene, they did not seem dangerous, for they were, of course, under Byzantine authority. But at the beginning of the fifties, a small stronghold near Callipolis (Gallipoli), Zympa, fell into the hands of the Turks. Cantacuzene’s attempt to bribe the Turks to evacuate Zympa failed.
In 1354 almost the whole southern coast of Thrace was struck by a terrible earthquake, which destroyed many cities and fortresses. The Turks fortified Zympa, and seized several cities in the peninsula which were abandoned by the population after the earthquake, among them Callipolis. There they constructed walls, erected strong fortifications and an arsenal, and set a large garrison, so that Callipolis became an extremely important strategic center and a base of support for their further advance in the Balkan peninsula. The people of Constantinople immediately realized their danger, and the news of the capture of Callipolis by the Turks threw them into despair. A prominent writer of the epoch, Demetrius Cydones, testified that clamors and lamentations resounded all over the whole city.
“What speeches,” he wrote, “were more heard then in the city? Have we not perished? Are not all of us within the walls [of the city] caught as if in the net of the barbarians? Is he not happy who, before these dangers, has left the city?” “In order to escape slavery” all were hastening to Italy, Spain, and even farther “towards the sea beyond the Pillars,”127 that is to say, beyond the Pillars of Hercules (present day Straits of Gibraltar), perhaps to England. Of these events a Russian chronicler remarked, “In the year 6854 [ab. 1346] the Ismailites [i.e., the Turks] crossed on this side, into the Greek land. In the year 6865 [ab. 1357] they took Callipolis from the Greeks.”128
At that time the Venetian representative at Constantinople notified his government of the danger from the Turks, their possible capture of the remnants of the Empire, the general discontent in Byzantium with the Emperor and government, and finally, the desire of the majority of the population to be under the power of the Latins, particularly of Venice. In another report the same official wrote that the Greeks of Constantinople, wishing to be protected against the Turks, desired first of all, the domination of Venice, or, if that was impossible, that of “the King of Hungary or Serbia.”129To what extent the point of view of the Venetian representative reflected the real spirit in Constantinople is difficult to say.
Historians usually call John Cantacuzene the sole cause of the first establishment of the Turks in the Balkan peninsula; he called on them for aid during his personal struggle for power with John Palaeologus. The impression was that the whole responsibility for the subsequent barbaric behavior of the Turks in Europe was Cantacuzene’s. But, of course, it is not he alone who is responsible for this event, fatal to both Byzantium and Europe. The chief cause lies in the general conditions in Byzantium and the Balkan peninsula, where no serious obstacles could be opposed to the unrestrainable onslaught of the Turks to the west. If Cantacuzene had not called them to Europe, they would have come there in any case. As T. Florinsky said, “By their continuous incursions the Turks had paved the way for the conquest of Thrace; the miserable internal conditions of the Greco-Slavonic world had greatly contributed to the success and impunity of their invasions; finally, the political leaders of various states and peoples … had not the least idea of the threatening danger from the advancing Muhammedan power; on the contrary, all of them sought to compromise with it for their own narrow, egoistic goals; Cantacuzene was no peculiar exception.” Like Cantacuzene, the Venetians and Genoese, “these privileged defenders of Christianity against Islam,” were at that time occupied with the idea of an alliance with the Turks. The great “Tsar of the Serbs and Greeks,” Dushan, was also seeking for the same alliance. “No one, of course, will absolutely justify Cantacuzene; he cannot be entirely cleared of blame for the unfortunate events which led to the establishment of the Turks in Europe; but we must not forget that he was not the only one. Stephen Dushan would perhaps have brought the Turks into the peninsula, as Cantacuzene had done, if the latter had not anticipated him and prevented him from coming to an agreement with Orkhan.”130
Having established themselves at Callipolis the Turks, taking advantage of the unceasing internal troubles in Byzantium and the Slavonic states, Bulgaria and Serbia, began to extend their conquests in the Balkan peninsula. Orkhan’s successor, Sultan Murad I, captured many fortified places very near Constantinople, took possession of such important centers as Hadrianople and Philippopolis, and advancing to the west, began to menace Thessalonica. The capital of the Turkish state was transferred to Hadrianople. Constantinople was being gradually surrounded by Turkish possessions. The Emperor continued to pay tribute to the sultan.
These conquests brought Murad face to face with Serbia and Bulgaria, which had already lost their former strength due to their internal troubles. Murad marched upon Serbia. The Serbian prince Lazar set out to meet him. In the summer of 1389 the decisive battle took place in the central part of Serbia on the field of Kossovo. At the outset the victory seemed to be on the side of the Serbs. The story goes that a noble Serb, Milosh (Miloš) Obilić or Kobilić, contrived to force a passage into the Turkish camp, presented himself as a deserter to the Turks, and entering Murad’s tent killed him with a stab from a poisoned dagger. The confusion among the Turks was rapidly quelled by Bayazid, the son of the slain Murad. He surrounded the Serbian army and inflicted a crushing defeat upon it. Lazar was taken prisoner and slain. The year of the battle of Kossovo may be considered the year of the fall of Serbia. The miserable remnants of the Serbian Empire which continued to exist for seventy years more, do not deserve the name of a state. In 1389 Serbia became subject to Turkey.131 Four years later, in 1393 (i.e., after the death of John V), the capital of Bulgaria, Trnovo, was also captured by the Turks, and a short time later the whole territory of Bulgaria came under the power of the Turkish Empire.
The old and ill John V had to suffer a new humiliation which accelerated his death. To protect the capital against danger from the Turks John set about restoring the city walls and erecting fortifications. On learning of this the sultan commanded him to destroy what had been built and, in case of refusal, threatened to blind the Emperor’s son and heir, Manuel, who was at that time at Bayazid’s court. John was compelled to yield, and fulfill the sultan’s demand. Constantinople entered upon the most critical epoch of its existence.
Genoa, the Black Death of 1348, and the Venetian-Genoese War.—Toward the end of the reign of Andronicus III, the Genoese colony of Galata had obtained a powerful economic and political position and was a sort of state within the state. Taking advantage of the absence of the Byzantine fleet, the Genoese sent their vessels to all the ports of the Archipelago and seized the whole import trade in the Black Sea and in the Straits. A contemporary source, Nicephorus Gregoras, stated that the income from custom duties of Galata amounted annually to 200,000 gold coins, while Byzantium received barely 30,000.132 Realizing the danger to Byzantium from Galata, Cantacuzene, notwithstanding the internal strife that was wasting the country, started, as far as the disordered finances of the Empire permitted, to build vessels for military and commercial use. The alarmed population of Galata determined to resist Cantacuzene’s plans by force; they occupied the heights commanding Galata and there erected walls, a tower, and various earthen fortifications, and took the initiative against Cantacuzene. The first attack of the Genoese upon Constantinople itself was a failure. The vessels built by Cantacuzene entered the Golden Horn to fight the Genoese, who at sight of the strength of the new Byzantine fleet were on the point of making peace. But the inexperience of the Greek commanders and the outbreak of a storm led to the crushing of the Greek fleet. The Genoese at Galata decorated their vessels and sailed triumphantly by the imperial palace, mocking the imperial flag which had been taken from the defeated Greek ships. According to the conditions of peace, the debatable heights over Galata remained in the hands of the Genoese, and Galata became increasingly dangerous to Constantinople.
This increase in Genoese influence, already great, could not fail to affect the position of Venice, Genoa’s chief commercial foe in the East. The interests of both republics clashed acutely in the Black Sea and in the Maeotis (the Sea of Azov), where the Genoese had established themselves at Kaffa (Caffa, present-day Theodosia in the Crimea) and Tana, at the mouth of the River Don (near present-day Azov). The Bosphorus, the entrance into the Black Sea, was also in the hands of the Genoese, who, also possessing Galata, had organized on the shore of the Straits a sort of customs house which took commercial tolls from all vessels not Genoese, especially Venetian and Byzantine, sailing into the Black Sea. Genoa’s goal was the establishment of a trade monopoly in the Bosphorus. The interests of Venice and Genoa also came into collision in the islands and on the coast of the Aegean Sea.
An immediate clash between the two republics was temporarily averted by the plague of 1348 and the following years, which paralyzed their forces. This terrible plague, the so-called Black Death, which had been carried from the interior of Asia to the coast of the Maeotis (the Sea of Azov) and to the Crimea, spread from the pestiferous Genoese trade-galleys sailing from Tana and Kaffa all over Constantinople, where it carried off, according to the probably exaggerated statements of the western chronicles, two-thirds or eight-ninths of the population.133 Thence the plague passed to the islands of the Aegean Sea and the coast of the Mediterranean. Byzantine historians have left a detailed description of the disease showing the complete impotence of the physicians in their struggle against it.134 In his description of this epidemic John Cantacuzene imitated the famous description of the Athenian plague in the second book of Thucydides. From Byzantium, as western chroniclers narrated, the Genoese galleys spread the disease through the coast cities of Italy, France, and Spain. “There is something incredible,” remarked M. Kovalevsky, “in this uninterrupted wandering of the pestiferous galleys through the Mediterranean ports.”135 From these the plague spread to the north and west, and affected Italy, Spain, France, England, Germany, and Norway.136 At this time, in Italy, Boccaccio was writing his famous Decameron which begins “with a description of the Black Death classical in its picturesqueness and measured solemnity,”137 when many brave men, fair ladies, and gallant youths “in the soundest of health, broke fast with their kinsfolk, comrades, and friends in the morning, and when evening came, supped with their forefathers in the other world.”138 Scholars compare the description of Boccaccio with that of Thucydides, and some of them hold the humanist in higher estimation even than the classic writer.139
From Germany through the Baltic Sea and Poland the plague penetrated into Pskov, Novgorod, and Moscow, in Russia, where the great prince, Simeon the Proud, fell its victim in 1353, and then it spread all over Russia. In some cities, according to the statement of a Russian chronicle, no single man was left alive.140
Venice was actively preparing for war. After the horrors of the plague were somewhat forgotten, the Republic of St. Mark made an alliance with the King of Aragon. The latter was discontented with Genoa and consented, by his attacks upon the shores and islands of Italy, to distract the Genoese and thereby to facilitate the advance of Venice in the east. After some hesitation John Cantacuzene joined the Aragon-Venetian alliance against Genoa; he accused the “ungrateful nation of the Genoese” of forgetting “the fear of the Lord,” devastating the seas “as if they were seized with a mania for pillaging,” and of endeavoring permanently “to disturb the seas and navigators by their piratical attacks.”141
The chief battle, in which about 150 Greek, Venetian, Aragonese, and Genoese vessels took part, was fought in the beginning of the sixth decade, in the Bosphorus. It had no decisive result; each side claimed victory. The friendly relations between the Genoese and Ottoman-Turks forced John Cantacuzene to give up his alliance with Venice and become reconciled with the Genoese, to whom he gave his promise not to support Venice henceforth. He also consented to give more territory to the Genoese colony of Galata. But after some clashes Venice and Genoa, exhausted by the war, made peace. Since it failed to solve the chief problem in the conflict, the peace lasted only a short time; again a war broke out, the war of Tenedos. Tenedos, one of the few islands of the Archipelago still in the hands of the Byzantine emperors, possessed, owing to its position at the entrance into the Dardanelles, the greatest significance for the states which had commercial relations with Constantinople and the countries around the Black Sea. Since both shores of the straits were in the hands of the Ottoman Turks, Tenedos was an excellent observation point of their actions. Venice, which had already for a long time dreamed of occupying this island, after long negotiations with the Emperor at last got his consent. But the Genoese could not acquiesce in the cession of Tenedos to Venice; in order to prevent its accomplishment, they succeeded in raising a revolution at Constantinople which deposed John V and set his eldest son, Andronicus, upon the throne for three years. The war which had broken out between the two republics exhausted both of them and ruined all the states which had commercial concerns in the East. At last, in 1381, the war ended with the peace made at Turin, the capital of the Duchy of Savoy.
A detailed and voluminous text of the conference of Turin exists.142 With the personal participation of the count of Savoy, the conference discussed various general problems of international life, which was already very complicated at that time, and worked out the conditions of peace; of the latter, only those are interesting here which put an end to the dispute between Venice and Genoa and which referred to Byzantium. Venice was to evacuate the island of Tenedos, the fortifications of which were leveled to the ground; the island itself was on a set date to pass into the hands of the Count of Savoy (in manibus prefati domini Sabaudie comitis), who was related to the Palaeologi (on the side of Anne of Savoy, wife of Andronicus III). Thus neither Venice nor Genoa gained this important strategic point, to whose possession they had so eagerly aspired.
A Spanish traveler, Pero Tafur, who visited Constantinople in 1437 gave a very interesting description of Tenedos:
We came to the island of Tenedos, where we anchored and disembarked. While the ship was being refitted we set out to see the island, which is some eight or ten miles about. There are many conies, and it is covered with vineyards, but they are all spoilt. The harbour of Tenedos looks so new that it might have been built today by a masterhand. The mole is made of great stones and columns, and here the ships have their moorings and excellent anchorage. There are other places where ships can anchor, but this is the best, since it is opposite the entrance to the Straits of Romania [Dardanelles]. Above the harbour is a great hill surmounted by a very strong castle. This castle was the cause of much fighting between the Venetians and Genoese until the Pope sentenced it to be destroyed, that it might belong to neither. But, without doubt, this was very ill-advised, since the harbour is one of the best in the world. No ship can enter the straits without first anchoring there to find the entrance, which is very narrow, and the Turks, knowing how many ships touch there, arm themselves and lie in wait and kill many Christians.143
As for the acute question of the trade-monopoly of the Genoese in the Black Sea and Maeotis, especially in the colony of Tana, Genoa, according to the conditions of the peace of Turin, was obliged to give up her intention of closing the Venetian markets of the Black Sea and of shutting off access to Tana. The commercial nations resumed their intercourse with Tana, which, situated at the mouth of the river Don, was one of the very important centers of trade with eastern peoples. Peaceful relations between Genoa and the elderly John V, who had regained the throne, were restored. Byzantium had again to steer a way between the two republics, whose commercial interests in the East, despite the terms of peace, continued to collide. However, the peace of Turin, which ended a great war caused by the economic rivalry of Venice and Genoa, was of great importance because it allowed the nations which maintained intercourse with Romania to resume their trade, which had been interrupted for many years. But their further destiny depended upon the Ottoman Turks, to whom, as was already obvious at the end of the fourteenth century, belonged the future of the Christian East.
Manuel II (1391–1421) and the Turks
In one of his essays, Manuel II wrote: “When I had passed my childhood and not yet reached the age of man, I was encompassed by a life full of tribulation and trouble; but according to many indications, it might have been foreseen that our future would cause us to look at the past as a time of clear tranquility.”144 Manuel’s presentiments did not deceive him.
Byzantium, or rather, Constantinople, was in a desperate and humiliating position in the last years of the reign of John V. At the moment of John’s death, Manuel was at the court of Sultan Bayazid. When tidings of his father’s death reached him, he succeeded in fleeing from the sultan and arrived in Constantinople, where he was crowned emperor. According to Ducas, Bayazid, feared the popularity of Manuel and regretted not having murdered him during his stay at his court. Bayazid’s envoy sent to Constantinople to Manuel, as Ducas related, gave the new Emperor these words from the sultan: “If you wish to execute my orders, close the gates of the city and reign within it; but all that lies outside belongs to me.”145 Thereafter Constantinople was practically in a state of siege. The only relief for the capital lay in the unsatisfactory condition of the Turkish fleet; for that reason the Turks, though possessing both sides of the Dardanelles, were unable for the time being to cut off Byzantium from intercourse with the outside world through this strait. Especially terrible to the Christian East was the moment when Bayazid, by craftiness, gathered together in one place the representatives of the families of the Palaeologi with Manuel at their head, and the Slavonic princes; he seems to have intended to do away with them at once, “in order that,” to quote the Sultan’s words given in a writing of Manuel, “after the land had been cleared of thorns, by which he meant us [that is to say, the Christians], his sons might dance in the Christian land without fearing to scratch their feet.”146 The representatives of the ruling families were spared, but the severe wrath of the sultan struck many nobles of their retinue.
In 1392 Bayazid organized a maritime expedition in the Black Sea ostensibly against Sinope. But the sultan put the Emperor Manuel at the head of the Turkish fleet. Therefore Venice thought that this expedition was directed not against Sinope, but against the Venetian colonies, south of the Dardanelles, in the Archipelago—not a Turkish expedition, but a disguised Greek expedition, supported by Turkish troops. As a recent historian said, the Oriental problem of the end of the fourteenth century might have been solved by the formation of a Turko-Greek Empire.147 This interesting episode, evidence of which is in the archives of Venice, had no important results. Shortly after, the friendly relations between Byzantium and Bayazid came to an open break, and Manuel again turned to the West which for some time had been neglected.
Hard pressed, Manuel opened friendly negotiations with Venice. Bayazid tried to cut off Constantinople from its food supply. Such acute need was felt in the capital that, as a Byzantine chronicler said, the people pulled down their houses in order to get wood for baking bread.148 At the request of Byzantine envoys, Venice sent some corn to Constantinople.149
The crusade of Sigismund of Hungary and the Battle of Nicopolis.—Meanwhile, the successes of the Turks in the Balkan peninsula again raised the question of immediate danger to western Europe. The subjugation of Bulgaria and the nearly complete conquest of Serbia had led the Turks to the borders of the Kingdom of Hungary. The king of Hungary, Sigismund, feeling complete impotence against the threatening Turkish danger with only his own forces, appealed to the European rulers for help. France answered the appeal with the greatest enthusiasm. In obedience to the voice of his people, the king of France sent a small body of troops, the duke of Burgundy at their head. Poland, England, Germany, and some smaller states also sent troops. Venice joined the campaign. Just before Sigismund’s crusade started, Manuel seems to have formed a league with the Genoese of the Aegean islands, namely Lesbos and Chios, and with the Knights of Rhodes, in other words, with the Christian outposts in the Aegean Sea.150 As for Manuel’s relation to Sigismund’s crusade, perhaps he pledged himself to share in the expenses of the campaign.
The crusading enterprise ended in complete failure. In 1396, the crusaders were crushed by the Turks in the battle of Nicopolis (on the right shore of the lower Danube) and compelled to return to their homes. Sigismund, who had barely escaped capture, sailed in a small vessel by way of the mouth of the Danube and the Black Sea to Constantinople, whence, by a roundabout way through the Archipelago and the Adriatic Sea, he returned to Hungary.151 A participator in the battle of Nicopolis, the Bavarian soldier Schiltberger, who had been taken prisoner by the Turks, and spent some time at Gallipoli, described as an eyewitness Sigismund’s passage through the Dardanelles which the Turks could not prevent. According to his statement, the Turks put all their Christian captives in line along the shore of the straits and mockingly shouted to Sigismund to leave his vessel and free his people.152
After the defeat of the western crusaders at Nicopolis, the victorious Bayazid, planning to strike a final blow to Constantinople, decided to ruin the few regions that still belonged, though almost nominally, to the Empire, from which the besieged capital could get some help. He devastated Thessaly, which submitted to him, and, according to Turkish sources, even seized Athens for a short time;153 his best generals inflicted terrible destruction on Morea, where Manuel’s brother was ruling under the title of Despot.
Meanwhile, popular dissatisfaction was growing in the capital; the tired and exhausted populace were murmuring, accusing Manuel of their misery, and beginning to turn their eyes to his nephew John, who had in 1390 deposed for some months Manuel’s old father, John V.
The expedition of Marshal Boucicaut.—Realizing that with his own forces he would not be able to overcome the Turks, Manuel decided to appeal for help to the most powerful rulers of western Europe and to the Russian great prince Vasili I Dmitrievich. The pope, Venice, France, England, and possibly Aragon replied favorably to Manuel’s appeal. His request seemed especially flattering to the king of France, because, declared a contemporary western chronicler, “it was the first time that the ancient emperors of the whole world had appealed for help to such a remote country.”154Manuel’s appeal to western Europe gained him a certain, but an insufficient, amount of money, and the hope of getting from France aid in men.
Manuel’s request for help from the Great Prince of Moscow, supported by a request to the same purpose from the patriarch of Constantinople, was favorably received in Moscow. There seems to have been no question at the court of Moscow of sending troops to Constantinople; it was only a question of granting “alms to those who are in such need and misery, besieged by the Turks.”155 Money was sent to Constantinople, where it was accepted with great gratitude. But money contributions could not help Manuel substantially.
The king of France, Charles VI, fulfilled his promise and sent in support of Constantinople 1200 men-at-arms, at whose head he placed Marshal Boucicaut. Boucicaut was one of the most interesting men of France at the end of the fourteenth and the beginning of the fifteenth century. A man of extraordinary valor and determination, he had spent all his life in long journeys and dangerous adventures. As a young man, he had set out to the East, to Constantinople, traveled all over Palestine, reached Sinai, and for several months had been captive in Egypt. On his return to France, hearing of the appeal of the king of Hungary, Sigismund, Boucicaut had hastened to him, fought with astounding valor in the fatal battle of Nicopolis, and had fallen prisoner to Bayazid. Escaping death almost by a miracle, and ransomed, Boucicaut returned to France in order, in the ensuing year, with all readiness and energy, to take the head of the body of troops sent by Charles VI to the East.
Members of the most eminent families of the French chivalry were included among the men-at-arms of Boucicaut. He set out by sea. Notified of the approach of his vessels to the Dardanelles, Bayazid attempted to prevent the Marshal from passing through the straits. But Boucicaut, after many dangers and with much effort, succeeded in breaking through the Dardanelles, and arriving in Constantinople, where his fleet was received with the greatest joy. Boucicaut and Manuel made many devastating raids along the Asiatic coast of the Marmora Sea and the Bosphorus, and even penetrated into the Black Sea. But these successes did not change the situation; they could not free Constantinople from her approaching fall. Seeing the critical position of Manuel and his capital, as regards both finances and provisions, Boucicaut determined to return to France, but only after he had persuaded the Emperor to go with him to the West in order to make a stronger impression there and induce the western European rulers to take more decisive steps. Such modest expeditions as that of Boucicaut evidently could not help the desperate situation of Byzantium.
The journey of Manuel II in Western Europe.—When Manuel’s journey to the West was decided, his nephew John consented to take the reins of government during the Emperor’s absence. Late in the year 1399, accompanied by a retinue of clerical and lay representatives, Manuel and Boucicaut left the capital for Venice.156
The Republic of St. Mark was in a difficult position when asked to lend Byzantium a helping hand. Her important commercial interests in the East caused Venice to regard the Turks, especially after their brilliant victory at Nicopolis, not only from the point of view of a Christian state, but also from that of a trading state. Venice had even made some treaties with Bayazid. Then commercial rivalry with Genoa in the East, and the attitude of Venice towards the other Italian states, also kept her forces from Manuel’s aid. They were needed at home. But Venice and the other Italian cities visited by Manuel received him with honor and showed him great compassion. Whether the Emperor saw the pope or not is doubtful. When Manuel was leaving Italy, encouraged by the promises of Venice and the Duke of Milan and the papal bulls, and planning a visit to the greatest centers of western Europe, Paris and London, he still believed in the importance and effectiveness of his long journey.
The Emperor arrived in France at a complex and interesting time, the epoch of the Hundred Years’ War between France and England. The armistice which existed at his arrival might be broken at any moment. In France there was going on a very real and active polemic struggle between the Pope of Avignon and the University of Paris, which had reduced the papal power in France and caused the recognition of the final authority of the king in ecclesiastical affairs. Finally King Charles VI himself was subject to frequent fits of insanity.
A solemn reception and a richly adorned residence in the palace of the Louvre were prepared in Paris for Manuel. A Frenchman who was an eyewitness of the Emperor’s entrance into Paris describes his appearance: he was of average stature and solid constitution, with a long and already very white beard, had features which inspired respect and, in the opinion of the French, was worthy of being Emperor.157
His stay in Paris of more than four months afforded modest results: the king and Royal Council decided to support him by a body of men-at-arms, at whose head Marshal Boucicaut was to be placed. Satisfied with that promise, the Emperor went to London, where he was also received with great honor and given many promises, but he was soon disappointed. In one of his letters from London, Manuel wrote: “The King gives us help in warriors, marksmen, money, and vessels to carry the troops where we need.”158 But this promise was not fulfilled. After a stay of two months in London, Manuel, loaded with presents and overwhelmed with attention and honor, but without the promised military support, returned to Paris. An English historian of the fifteenth century, Adam Usk, wrote: “I thought within myself, what a grievous thing it was that this great Christian prince from the farther East, should perforce be driven by unbelievers to visit the distant islands of the West, to seek aid against them. My God! What dost thou, ancient glory of Rome? Shorn is the greatness of thine empire this day; and truly may the words of Jeremy be spoken unto thee: ‘Princess among the provinces, how is she become tributary, (Lament. I:I).’ Who would ever believe that thou shouldst sink to such depth of misery, that, although once seated on the throne of majesty thou didst lord it over all the world, now thou hast no power to bring succour to the Christian faith?”159
Manuel’s second stay in Paris lasted about two years. Information on this visit is scanty. He became, apparently, a matter of course to the French, and contemporary chroniclers who note many details concerning Manuel’s first stay in Paris, say very little of his second visit. The little information on this subject comes from his letters. Those which refer to the beginning of his second stay are marked by high spirits; but these spirits gradually fell as he began to understand that he could not count upon any important support from either England or France. Of the last period of his stay in France, there are no imperial letters.
But some interesting records exist describing the way the Emperor spent his leisure time in Paris. In the beautifully decorated castle of the Louvre, for example, where Manuel had his residence, the Emperor turned his attention, among other decorations, to a magnificent tapestry, a kind of Gobelin, with a reproduction of spring. In his leisure time, the Emperor made a fine description written in a rather jocose style of this reproduction of spring on “a royal woven curtain.” This essay of Manuel exists today.160
The battle of Angora and its significance to Byzantium.—Meanwhile, the fruitless stay of Manuel in Paris began to seem endless. At this time an event which had taken place in Asia Minor induced the Emperor to leave France at once and to return to Constantinople. In July, 1402, was fought the famous battle of Angora, by which Timur (Tamerlane) defeated Bayazid and thereby relieved Constantinople from immediate danger. The news of this exceedingly important event reached Paris only two and a half months after the battle. The Emperor prepared quickly for his return journey and came back to the capital via Genoa and Venice after three years and a half of absence. The Slavonic city on the Adriatic, Ragusa (Dubrovnik), hoping that the Emperor would stop there on his way home, made elaborate preparations to welcome him. But he passed by without stopping.161 In memory of his stay in France, he presented to the abbey of St. Denis near Paris an illuminated manuscript of Dionysius the Areopagite, preserved today in the Louvre. Among the miniatures of this manuscript is the picture of the Emperor, his wife, and their three sons. Manuel’s picture is of great interest, because the Turks found and admired in his features a strong resemblance to Muhammed, the founder of Islam. Bayazid, reported the Byzantine historian Phrantzes, said of Manuel: “One who does not know that he is Emperor would say from his appearance that he is Emperor.”162
The fruitlessness of Manuel’s journey to western Europe, as far as the substantial needs of the Empire were concerned, is evident; both historians and chroniclers of the time recognized the lack of result and pointed it out in their annals.163 But this journey is of great interest examined from the point of view of the information acquired by western Europe about the Byzantine Empire in the period of its fall. This journey is an episode in the cultural intercourse between West and East at the end of the fourteenth and beginning of the fifteenth century, in the epoch of the Italian Renaissance.
The battle of Angora had great importance for the last days of the Byzantine Empire. Towards the end of the fourteenth century, the Mongol empire, which had fallen into pieces, was unified again under the power of Timur or Tamerlane (Timur-Lenk, which means in translation “iron-lame,” Timur the Lame). Timur had undertaken on a large scale many devastating expeditions into southern Russia, northern India, Mesopotamia, Persia, and Syria. His marches were accompanied by atrocious cruelties. Thousands of men were slain, cities ruined, fields destroyed. A Byzantine historian wrote: “When Timur’s Mongols left one city to go to another, they left it so deserted and abandoned, that in it was heard neither barking of dog, nor cackling of fowl, nor cry of child.”164
Entering Asia Minor after his Syrian expedition, Timur clashed with the Ottoman Turks. Sultan Bayazid hastened from Europe to Asia Minor to meet Timur, and there, at the city of Angora (Ancyra), in 1402, was fought a bloody battle, which ended in the complete defeat of the Turks. Bayazid himself fell a prisoner to Timur; he shortly after died in captivity. Timur did not remain in Asia Minor. He undertook an expedition against China, and on his way there died. After his death, the whole huge Mongol Empire fell to pieces and lost its significance. But after their defeat at Angora, the Turks were so weakened that for a time they were unable to take decisive steps against Constantinople; thereby the existence of the dying Empire was prolonged for another fifty years.
In spite of Manuel’s poor success, he did not give up his plans after his return from western Europe but continued to seek for the help of the West against the Turks. There are two very interesting letters addressed by Manuel to the kings of Aragon, Martin V (1395–1410) and Ferdinand I (1412–1416). In the first, which was transmitted to Martin through the agency of the famous Byzantine humanist Manuel Chrysoloras, who was at that time in Italy, Manuel informed Martin that he was sending him, at his request, some precious relics, and begged him to convey to Constantinople the money which had been collected in Spain to help the Empire.165 Chrysoloras’ mission, however, came to nothing. Later, during a voyage to Morea, Manuel wrote another letter from Thessalonica, this time addressed to Ferdinand I. It shows that Ferdinand had promised Manuel’s son Theodore, the despot of Morea, to come there with a considerable army to aid the Christians in general and Manuel in particular. Manuel wrote to express his hope of meeting Ferdinand in Morea, but Ferdinand never came.166
The situation in the Peloponnesus.—In the last fifty years of the existence of the remains of the Byzantine Empire, the Peloponnesus, rather unexpectedly, attracted the attention of the central government. As the territory of the Empire was reduced to Constantinople, the adjoining portion of Thrace, one or two islands in the Archipelago, Thessalonica, and the Peloponnesus, obviously next to Constantinople the Peloponnesus was the most important part of the Greek possessions. Contemporaries discovered that it was an ancient and purely Greek country, that the inhabitants were real Hellenes and not Romans, and that nowhere else could be created a basis for continuing the struggle against the Ottomans. While northern Greece had already fallen a prey to the Turks and the rest of ancient Greece was on the point of succumbing to the Turkish yoke, in the Peloponnesus there arose a center of Greek national spirit and Hellenic patriotism, which was powerfully affected by a dream, delusive from the historical point of view, of regenerating the Empire and opposing the might of the Ottoman state.
After the Fourth Crusade, the Peloponnesus (or Morea) passed into the power of the Latins. At the beginning of the reign of the restorer of the Byzantine Empire, Michael VIII Palaeologus, the prince of Achaia, William Villehardouin, was captured by the Greeks and gave as ransom three strongholds: Monembasia, Maina, and the recently built Mistra. Since the Greek power in the Peloponnesus was slowly but continuously increasing at the expense of the Latin possessions, the Byzantine province which had been formed there became by the middle of the fourteenth century so important that it was reorganized as a separate despotat and made the appanage of the second son of the Constantinopolitan emperor, who became a sort of viceroy of the emperor in the Peloponnesus. At the end of the fourteenth century the Peloponnesus was mercilessly devastated by the Turks. Having lost all hope of defending the country with his own forces, the Despot of Morea proposed to yield his possessions to the Knights of the Order of Hospitalers of St. John, who at that time held the island of Rhodes, and only the popular insurrection at Mistra, capital of the Despotat, which burst out at this proposal, prevented him from doing so. The weakness of the Ottoman Turks after the defeat of Angora made it possible for the Peloponnesus to recover a little and to hope for better times.167
The chief city of the Despotat of Morea, Mistra, medieval Sparta, residence of the Despot, was in the fourteenth century and at the beginning of the fifteenth a political and cultural center of reviving Hellenism. Here were the tombs of the Despots of Morea. Here John Cantacuzene died at a very advanced age, and here he was buried. While the condition of the country people made a contemporary, Mazaris, afraid that he himself would become a barbarian,168 at the court of the Despot, in his castle of Mistra, was a cultural center which was attracting educated Greeks, scholars, sophists, and courtiers. It is related that in the fourteenth century, at Sparta, there existed a school for copiers of ancient manuscripts. Gregorovius justly compared the court of Mistra with some courts of Italian princes of the Renaissance.169 The famous Byzantine scholar, humanist, and philosopher, Gemistus Plethon, lived at the court of the Despot of Morea during the reign of Manuel II.
In 1415, Manuel himself visited the Peloponnesus, where his second son Theodore was Despot at the time. The Emperor’s first measure to protect the peninsula against future invasions was the construction of a wall with numerous towers on the Isthmus of Corinth. The wall was erected on the site of the rampart which in the fifth century B.C. the Peloponnesians had raised on the approach of Xerxes; this was restored in the third century A.D. by the Emperor Valerian when he fortified Greece against the Goths; and finally it was constructed again by Justinian the Great when Greece was threatened by the Huns and Slavs.170 In preparation for this same Turkish danger in the fifteenth century, the predecessor of Theodore had established numerous colonies of Albanians in some desert regions of the Peloponnesus, and Manuel II, who delivered his funeral oration,171praised him for this precaution.
The projected reforms of Gemistus Plethon.—In Peloponnesian affairs in that time there were two interesting contemporary writers, quite different in character. One was the Byzantine scholar and humanist, Gemistus Plethon, a philhellenist obsessed by the idea that the Peloponnesian population was of the purest and most ancient Hellenic blood and that from the Peloponnesus had come the noblest and most famous families “of the Hellenes,” who had achieved “the greatest and most celebrated deeds.”172 The other was Mazaris, author of the Sojourn of Mazaris in Hades, “undoubtedly,” as K. Krumbacher said, perhaps not without exaggeration, “the worst of the hitherto known imitations of Lucian,”173 a kind of libel, in which the author describes sarcastically the customs and manners of the Peloponnesus-Morea, deriving the latter name in the form of Mora(μώρα) from the Greek word moria (μωρία)174 meaning silliness, folly. In contrast to Plethon, Mazaris distinguished seven nationalities in the population of the Peloponnesus: Greeks (in Mazaris, Lacedaemonians and Peloponnesians), Italians (i.e. the remains of the Latin conquerors), Slavs (Sthlavinians), Illyrians (i.e. Albanians), Egyptians (Gipsies), and Jews.175 These statements of Mazaris are historical truth. Although both writers, the learned utopian Plethon as well as the satirist Mazaris, must be used with caution, both of them afford rich and interesting cultural data on the Peloponnesus of the first half of the fifteenth century.
To the time of Manuel II should be referred two interesting “accounts” or “addresses” written by Gemistus Plethon on the urgency of political and social reform for the Peloponnesus. One of these pamphlets was addressed to the Emperor, and the other to the Despot of Morea, Theodore. The German historian, Fallmerayer, was the first, in his History of the Peninsula of Morea, to draw the attention of scholars to the importance of those schemes of the Hellenic dreamer.176
Plethon had in view the regeneration of the Peloponnesus, and for this purpose he drew up a plan for a radical change in the social system and the treatment of the land problem.177 According to Plethon, society should be divided into three classes: (1) the cultivators of the soil (ploughmen, diggers, for example, diggers for vineyards, and shepherds); (2) those who provide instruments of work (i.e. those who care for oxen, cattle, and so on);178 and (3) those who have the care of safety and order, i.e., the army, government, and state officials; at the head of all should be an emperor—basileus. Opposed to mercenary troops, Plethon advocated the formation of an indigenous Greek army; and that the army may devote all their time and attention to performing their proper duties, Plethon divided the population into two categories: tax-payers, and those who render military service; the soldiery should not be liable to taxation. The portion of the taxable population which takes no part in administration and defense was called by Plethon the Helots. Private land ownership was abolished; “the whole land, as it seems to have been established by nature, should be the common property of the population; every one who will may plant and build a home where he would, and till the soil as much as he would and could.”179 These were the chief points of Plethon’s report. His scheme shows the influence of Plato, whom the Byzantine humanist greatly admired. It will remain an interesting cultural document of the Byzantine renaissance of the epoch of the Palaeologi. Several scholars indicate in Plethon’s scheme some points of analogy with parts of the Social Contract of Jean Jacques Rousseau, and with the ideas of Saint-Simon.180
Thus, on the eve of the final catastrophe, Plethon was proposing to Manuel II a plan of reforms for regenerated Hellas. The French Byzantinist, Ch. Diehl, wrote: “While Constantinople is weakened and falling, a Greek state tries to be born in Morea. And however vain these aspirations may seem and however sterile these wishes may appear, nevertheless this recovery of the consciousness of Hellenism and this conception of and obscure preparation for a better future is one of the most interesting and remarkable phenomena of Byzantine history.”181
The siege of Constantinople in 1422.—Until the beginning of the third decade of the fifteenth century, the relations between Manuel and Bayazid’s successor, Muhammed I, a noble representative of the Ottoman state, were marked, in spite of some errors on the part of the Emperor, by confidence and peace. Once, with the Emperor’s knowledge, the sultan passed through a suburb of Constantinople, where he was met by Manuel. Each sovereign remained on his own galley, and conversing from the galleys in a friendly manner, crossed the straits to the Asiatic coast where the sultan pitched his tents; but the Emperor did not descend from his galley. During dinner, the monarchs sent each other their most delicate dishes from their tables.182 But under Muhammed’s successor, Murad II, circumstances changed.
In the last years of his life, Manuel withdrew from state affairs and entrusted them to his son, John, who had neither experience nor the poise and noble character of his father. John insisted on supporting one of the Turkish pretenders to the sultan’s throne; an attempt at revolt failed and the infuriated Murad II decided to besiege Constantinople and crush at once this long-coveted city.
But the Ottoman forces, which had not had time enough to recover after the defeat of Angora and which were weakened by internal complications, were not yet ready to deal such a blow. In 1422, the Turks besieged Constantinople. In Byzantine literature there is a special work on this siege written by a contemporary, John Cananus, entitled, “A narrative of the Constantinopolitan wars of 6930 ( = 1422), when Amurat-bey attacked the city with a great army and would have taken it if the Blessed Mother of God had not preserved it.”183 A strong Muhammedan army equipped with various war machinery attempted to take the city by storm but it was repulsed by the heroic efforts of the population of the capital. Some complications within the Ottoman Empire compelled the Turks to give up the siege. The capital’s relief from danger was, as always, connected in popular tradition with the intercession of the Mother of God, the constant protectress of Constantinople. Meanwhile, the Turkish troops were not satisfied to attack the capital; after an unsuccessful attempt to take Thessalonica, they marched south into Greece where they destroyed the wall on the Isthmus of Corinth built by Manuel, and devastated Morea.184 Manuel’s co-emperor John VIII spent about a year in Venice, Milan, and Hungary in search of aid. According to the peace made with the Turks, the Emperor pledged himself to continue to pay the sultan a definite tribute, and delivered to him several cities in Thrace. The territory of Constantinople was growing still more limited. After this siege, the capital dragged out a pitiful existence for about thirty years in anxious expectation of its unavoidable ruin.
In 1425, the paralyzed Manuel passed away. With a feeling of profound mourning the mass of the population of the capital followed the hearse of the dead Emperor. Such a crowd of mourning people had never been seen at the burial of any of his predecessors.185 A special investigator of Manuel’s activity, Berger de Xivrey, wrote: “This feeling will seem sincere to whoever will remember all the trials which this sovereign shared with his people, all his endeavors to help them, and the deep sympathy of thought and feeling he always had for them.”186
The most important event of the time of Manuel was the battle of Angora, which delayed the fall of Constantinople for fifty years. But even this brief relief from the Ottoman danger was attained not by the strength of the Byzantine emperor, but by the Mongol power accidentally created in the east. The chief event upon which Manuel had relied, the rising of western Europe in a crusade, had not taken place. The siege and storm of Constantinople by the Turks in 1422 was only a prologue to the siege and storm of 1453. In estimating relations with the Turks in Manuel’s time one must not lose sight of the personal influence which the Emperor had with the Turkish sultans and which several times delayed the final doom of the perishing Empire.
John VIII (1425–48) and the Turkish menace.—Under John VIII the territory of the Empire was reduced to the most modest extent. Shortly before his father’s death John had been forced to cede several cities of Thrace to the sultan. After John had become sole ruler of the Empire, his power extended, properly speaking, over Constantinople and the nearest surrounding country. But the rest of the Empire, for example, the Peloponnesus, Thessalonica, and some scattered cities in Thrace, were under the power of his brothers as separate principalities almost entirely independent.
In 1430, Thessalonica was conquered by the Turks. One of the brothers of John VIII, who was governing Thessalonica with the title of despot, realized that with his own forces he could not contend with the Turks, and sold the city to Venice for a sum of money. Venice in taking possession of this important commercial point pledged herself, according to Ducas, “to protect and nourish it, raise its prosperity, and make it a second Venice.”187 But the Turks, who already possessed the surrounding country, could not tolerate the establishment of Venice at Thessalonica. Under the personal leadership of the sultan, they laid siege to Thessalonica; the course and result of the siege are well described in a special work, On the last capture of Thessalonica, written by a contemporary, John Anagnostes (i.e., Reader).188 The Latin garrison of Thessalonica was small and the population of the city regarded the new Venetian masters as aliens. They could not resist the Turks who, after a short siege, took the city by storm and exposed it to terrible destruction and outrage. The people were murdered without distinction of sex or age. Churches were turned into mosques, but the Church of St. Demetrius of Thessalonica, the chief patron of the city, was temporarily left to the Christians, though in a state of complete desolation.
The taking of Thessalonica by the Turks was also described in Greek verse by a high church official in Constantinople in his Chronicle on the Turkish Empire.189 Some Greek folk songs were composed on this disastrous event.190 The loss of Thessalonica impressed deeply both Venice and western Europe. The nearness of the decisive moment was of course also felt in the city of Constantinople.
An interesting description of Constantinople was written by a pilgrim returning from Jerusalem, a Burgundian knight, Bertrandon de la Broquière, who visited the capital of the Palaeologi at the beginning of the thirties, shortly after the fall of Thessalonica. He praised the good state of the walls, the land-walls in particular, but noticed some desolation in the city; he spoke for example of the ruins and remnants of two beautiful palaces destroyed, according to a tradition, by an Emperor at the command of a Turkish sultan. The Burgundian pilgrim visited the churches and other monuments of the capital, attended the solemn church services, saw in the church of St. Sophia the performance of a mystery on the subject of the three youths cast by Nebuchadnezzar into the fiery furnace, was charmed with the beauty of the Byzantine Empress, who came from Trebizond, and told the Emperor, who was interested in the fate of Joan of Arc, who had just been burnt at Rouen, “the whole truth” about the famous “Maid of Orléans.”191 The same pilgrim, from his observations of the Turks, believed it possible to expel them from Europe and even to regain Jerusalem. He wrote: “It seems to me that the noble people and the good government of the three nations I have mentioned, i.e., the French, English, and German, are rather formidable, and, if they are united in sufficient number, will be able to reach Jerusalem by land.”192
Realizing the coming danger to the capital from the Turks, John VIII undertook the great work of restoring the walls of Constantinople. Many inscriptions on the walls preserved today with the name of “John Palaeologus Autocrat in Christ,” testify to the Christian Emperor’s difficult last attempt to restore the fortifications of Theodosius the Younger, which had once appeared inaccessible.
But this did not suffice for the struggle with the Ottomans. Like his predecessors, John VIII hoped to receive real help against the Turks from the West, with the co-operation of the pope. For this purpose the Emperor himself with the Greek patriarch and a brilliant retinue sailed for Italy. The result of this journey was the conclusion of the famous Union of Florence. As far as real help to Byzantium was concerned, however, the imperial journey to Italy was of no avail.
Pope Eugenius IV preached a crusade and succeeded in arousing to war against the Turks the Hungarians, Poles, and Roumanians. A crusading army was formed under the command of the king of Poland and Hungary, Vladislav, and the famous Hungarian hero and chief, John Hunyadi. In the battle at Varna, in 1444, the crusaders were crushed by the Turks. Vladislav fell in battle. With the remnants of the army, John Hunyadi retreated to Hungary. The battle of Varna was the last attempt of western Europe to come to the help of perishing Byzantium. Thereafter Constantinople was left to its fate.193
Some documents from the archives of Barcelona, comparatively recently published, have revealed the aggressive plans of the famous Maecenas of the epoch of the Renaissance, the king of Aragon, Alfonso V the Magnanimous, who died in 1458. Having reunited Sicily and Naples under his power for a short time in the middle of the fifteenth century, he was planning to carry on a vast aggressive campaign in the East, which was similar to the grandiose plans of Charles of Anjou. Constantinople was one of Alfonso’s goals, and the idea of a crusade against the Turks never left him. For a long time he had realized that, if the growing might and “insolent prosperity” of the Ottomans were not put down, he would have no security for the maritime confines of his realm. But Alfonso’s ambitious plans were not realized and the Turks were never seriously menaced by this talented and brilliant humanist and politician.194
After the victory of the Turks at Varna, John VIII, who had taken no part in the crusading expedition, entered immediately into negotiations with the sultan, whom he endeavored to soften with presents, and he succeeded in keeping peaceful relations with him up to the end of his reign.
Although in relations with the Turks, Byzantium under John VIII suffered continuous and bitter failures, the Greek arms gained a considerable victory, though of short duration, in the Peloponnesus (Morea), an appanage nearly independent from the central government. Besides the Byzantine possessions, there were in the Peloponnesus the remnants of the principality of Achaia and some other places, especially in the very south of the peninsula which belonged to Venice. At the beginning of the fifteenth century Venice set herself the goal of subduing the portion of the Peloponnesus which was still in Latin hands; for this purpose she entered into negotiations with the different rulers in the peninsula. On one hand, the Republic of St. Mark wanted to take possession of the wall on the Isthmus of Corinth, which had been built under Manuel II, in order to offer adequate resistance to the Turkish invasions. On the other, Venice was attracted by her commercial interests, because, according to the information gathered by the representative of the Republic, the resources of the country in gold, silver, silk, honey, corn, raisins, and other things promised great advantages. During the reign of John VIII, however, the troops of the Greek despotat in Morea opened hostilities against the Latins, quickly gained the Latin part of the Peloponnesus, and thereby put an end to Frankish power in Morea. From then to the time of the Turkish conquest, the whole peninsula belonged to the family of the Palaeologi; Venice maintained only the points in the south, which she had possessed before.
One of the Despots of Morea, Constantine, John VIII’s brother, who was to be the last emperor of Byzantium, took advantage of some difficulties of the Turks in the Balkan peninsula to march north with his troops across the Isthmus of Corinth into middle and northern Greece, where the Turks were already making their conquests. After his victory over the Christians at Varna, Sultan Murad II considered the invasion of Constantine into northern Greece as an insult to him; he marched south, broke through the fortified wall on the Isthmus of Corinth, terribly devastated the Peloponnesus, and carried away into captivity a great number of Greeks. The horrified Despot Constantine was glad to make peace on the sultan’s terms; he remained Despot of Morea and pledged himself to pay a tribute to the sultan.
Under Constantine Palaeologus the famous traveler, archeologist, and merchant of that time, Cyriacus of Ancona, visited Mistra, where he was graciously received by the despot (Constantinum cognomento Dragas) and his dignitaries. At his court Cyriacus met Gemistus Plethon, “the most learned man of his age,” and Nicholas Chalcocondyles, son of his Athenian friend George, a young man very well versed in Latin and Greek.195 Nicholas Chalcocondyles can have been none other than the future historian Laonikos Chalcocondyles, for the name Laonikos is merely Nicolaos, Nicholas, slightly changed. During his first stay at Mistra, under the Despot Theodore Palaeologus, in 1437, Cyriacus had visited ancient monuments at Sparta and copied Greek inscriptions.196
Constantine XI (1449–53) and the capture of Constantinople by the Turks.—The territory which recognized the power of the last Byzantine emperor was confined to Constantinople with its nearest environs in Thrace, and the major part of the Peloponnesus or Morea at some distance from the capital, and governed by the Emperor’s brothers.
Honesty, generosity, energy, valor, and love of country were Constantine’s characteristics, vouched for by many Greek sources of his time and by his own conduct during the siege of Constantinople. An Italian humanist, Francesco Filelfo, who during his stay at Constantinople, knew Constantine personally before his ascension to the throne, in one of his letters calls the Emperor a man “of pious and lofty spirit (pio et excelso animo),”197
The strong and terrible adversary of Constantine was Muhammed II, twenty-one years old, who combined rude outbursts of harsh cruelty, blood-thirstiness, and many of the baser vices, with an interest in science, art, and education, energy, and the talents of a general, statesman, and organizer. A Byzantine historian relates that he occupied himself enthusiastically with the sciences, especially astrology, read the tales of the deeds of Alexander of Mace-don, Julius Caesar, and the emperors of Constantinople, and spoke five languages besides Turkish.198 Oriental sources praise his piety, justice, clemency, and protection of scholars and poets. Historians of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries vary in their estimation of Muhammed II; they range from denying him all positive qualities199 to acknowledging him as a man of genius.200 The desire to conquer Constantinople was an obsession with the young sultan, who, as the historian Ducas said, “by night and day, going to bed and getting up, within his palace and without, turned over and over in his mind the military actions and means by which he might take possession of Constantinople.” He spent sleepless nights drawing on paper the plan of the City and its fortifications, pointing out the places where it could be most easily attacked.201
The pictures of both these adversaries survive, those of Constantine Palaeologus on seals and in some later manuscripts,202 and those of Muhammed II on the medals struck by Italian artists in the fifteenth century in honor of the sultan and in some portraits, particularly one painted by the famous Venetian artist, Gentile Bellini, who spent a short time (in 1479–80) at Constantinople at the end of the reign of Muhammed.203
Having decided to deal the final blow to Constantinople, Muhammed set to work with extreme circumspection. First of all, north of the city, on the European shore of the Bosphorus, at its narrowest point, he built a powerful stronghold with towers, the majestic remnants of which are still to be seen (Rumeli-Hisar); the guns placed there hurled stone cannon balls which were enormous for the time.
When the erection of the stronghold on the Bosphorus was known, there came from the Christian population of the capital, Asia, Thrace, and the islands, from all directions, as Ducas said, exclamations of despair. “Now the end of the city has come; now we see the signs of the ruin of our race; now the days of Antichrist are at hand; what is to become of us or what have we to do? … Where are the saints who protect the city?”204 Another contemporary and eyewitness, who lived through all the horrors of the siege of Constantinople, the author of the precious Journal of the Siege, a Venetian, Nicolò Barbaro, wrote, “This fortification is exceedingly strong from the sea, so that it is absolutely impossible to capture it, for on the shore and walls are standing bombards in very great number; on the land side the fortification is also strong, though less so than from the sea.”205This stronghold put an end to the communication of the capital with the north and the ports of the Black Sea, for all foreign vessels, both on entering and leaving the Bosphorus, were intercepted by the Turks; in case of siege Constantinople would be deprived of the supply of corn from the ports of the Black Sea. It was very easy for the Turks to carry out these measures, because, opposite the European stronghold, there towered on the Asiatic shore of the Bosphorus the fortifications which had been built at the end of the fourteenth century by the Sultan Bayazid (Anatoli-Hisar). Next Muhammed invaded the Greek possessions in Morea, in order to prevent the Despot of Morea from coming to the aid of Constantinople in case of emergency. After these preliminary steps Muhammed, this “pagan enemy of the Christian people,”206 to quote Barbaro, began the siege of the great city.
Constantine made every possible effort adequately to meet his powerful adversary in the unequal struggle whose result, one may say, was foreordained. The Emperor had all possible corn supplies from the environs of the capital brought into the city and some repairs made on the city walls. The Greek garrison of the city numbered only a few thousands. Seeing the coming fatal danger, Constantine appealed to the West for help; but instead of the desired military support, a Roman cardinal, Greek by origin, Isidore, the former metropolitan of Moscow and participator in the Council of Florence, arrived in Constantinople, and in commemoration of the restored peace between the Eastern and Western churches, celebrated a union service in St. Sophia, which aroused the greatest agitation in the city population. One of the most prominent dignitaries of Byzantium, Lucas Notaras, uttered his famous words, “It is better to see in the city the power of the Turkish turban than that of the Latin tiara.”207
The Venetians and Genoese took part in the defense of the capital. Constantine and the population of the city relied especially on a Genoese noble of great military reputation, John (Giovanni) Giustiniani, who arrived in Constantinople with two large vessels bringing seven hundred fighting men. Access to the Golden Horn was barred, as had already happened several times at dangerous moments in the past, by a massive iron chain. The remains of this chain, it was supposed, could be seen until recently in the Byzantine church of St. Irene, where the Ottoman Military-Historical Museum is now established.208
The military forces of Muhammed on land and sea which consisted, besides the Turks, of the representatives of different peoples whom he had conquered, largely exceeded the modest number of the defenders of Constantinople, the Greeks and some Latins, particularly Italians.
One of the most important events in all world history was imminent.
The very fact of Turkish siege and capture of the “City protected by God,” Constantinople, left a deep mark in the sources, which, in various languages and from different points of view, described the last moments of the Byzantine Empire and allow one to follow, sometimes literally by days and hours, the development of the last act of this thrilling historical drama. The sources which exist are written in Greek, Latin, Italian, Slavonic, and Turkish.
The chief Greek sources vary in their estimation of the event. George Phrantzes, who participated in the siege, an intimate friend of the last Emperor, and a very well-known diplomat, who held high offices in the Empire, was full of boundless love for his Emperor-hero and for the house of the Palaeologi in general, and was opposed to the union of the Churches; he described the last days of Byzantium in order to restore the honor of the vanquished Constantine, his abused country, and the insulted Greek Orthodox faith. Another contemporary writer, the Greek Critobulus, who had passed over to the Turks and wished to prove his devotion to Muhammed II, dedicated his history, which shows strongly the influence of Thucydides, to the “greatest emperor, king of kings, Mehemet”;209 he related the last days of Byzantium from the point of view of a subject of the new Ottoman Empire, though he did not attack his Greek countrymen. A Greek of Asia Minor, Ducas, a supporter of the union, in which he saw the only means of security for the Empire, wrote from a standpoint favorable to the West, especially stressed the services and merits of the Genoese commander, Giustiniani, rather belittled the role of Constantine, but at the same time wrote not without love and pity for the Greeks. Finally, the fourth Greek historian of the last period of Byzantium, the only Athenian in Byzantine literature, Laonikos Chalcocondyles (or Chalcondyles), choosing as the main topic of his history not Byzantium, but the Turkish Empire, took a new and vast theme to describe— “the extraordinary evolution of the might of the young Ottoman Empire which was rising on the ruins of the Greek, Frankish, and Slavonic states”;210 in other words, his work is general in character. Since, in addition to that, Laonikos was not an eyewitness of the last days of Constantinople, it has only secondary significance.
Among the most valuable sources written in Latin were several by authors who lived through the whole time of the siege at Constantinople. One was the appeal To All the Faithful of Christ (Ad universos Christifideles de expugnatione Constantinopolis) written by Cardinal Isidore, who narrowly escaped Turkish captivity. He begged all Christians to rise up in arms to defend the perishing Christian faith. The report to the pope of the archbishop of Chios, Leonard, who also escaped Turkish captivity, interpreted the great distress which had befallen Byzantium as a punishment for the Greeks’ secession from the Catholic faith. Finally, a poem in verse, in four stanzas, “Constantinopolis,” was composed by an Italian, Pusculus, who spent some time in Turkish captivity. He was an imitator of Virgil and to a certain extent of Homer. A zealous Catholic, he dedicated his poem to the pope and was, like Leonard, convinced that God had punished Byzantium for its schism.
Italian sources have given us the priceless Journal of the siege of Constantinople, written in the old Venetian dialect in a dry business style, by a noble Venetian, Nicolò Barbaro. He enumerated day by day the conflicts between the Greeks and Turks during the siege, and his work is therefore of the greatest importance for the reconstruction of the chronology of the siege.
In old Russian an important history of the capture of Tsargrad, “this great and terrible deed,” was written by the “unworthy and humble Nestor Iskinder (Iskander).”211 Probably a Russian by origin, he fought in the sultan’s army and described truthfully and, as far as possible, day by day, the actions of the Turks during the siege and after the fall of the city. The story of the fall of Constantinople is also related in various Russian chronicles.
Finally, there are Turkish sources estimating the great event from the point of view of triumphant and victorious Islam and its brilliant representative, Muhammed II the Conqueror. Sometimes Turkish sources offer a collection of Turkish popular legends about Constantinople and the Bosphorus.212
This enumeration of the chief sources shows what rich and various information exists for the study of the problem of the siege and capture of Constantinople by the Turks.
At the beginning of April, 1453, the siege of the great city began. It was not only the incomparably greater military forces of the Turks that contributed to the success of the siege. Muhammed II, called by Barbaro, “this perfidious Turk, dog-Turk,”213 was the first sovereign in history who had at his disposal a real park of artillery. The perfected Turkish bronze cannons, of gigantic size for that time, hurled to a great distance enormous stone shots, whose destructive blows the old walls of Constantinople could not resist. The Russian tale of Tsargrad states that “the wretched Muhammed” conveyed close to the city walls “cannons, arquebuses, towers, ladders, siege machinery, and other wall-battering devices.”214 The contemporary Greek historian, Critobulus, had a good understanding of the decisive role of artillery when he wrote that all the saps made by the Turks under the walls and their subterraneous passages “proved to be superfluous and involved only useless expense, as cannons decided everything.”215
In the second half of the nineteenth century, in several places of Stamboul, one might still see on the ground the huge cannon shots which had hurtled over the walls and were lying in nearly the same places in which they had fallen in 1453. On April 20 the only piece of good fortune for the Christians in the whole siege took place: the four Genoese vessels which had come to the aid of Constantinople, defeated the Turkish fleet in spite of its far superior numbers. “One may easily imagine,” wrote a recent historian of the siege and capture of the Byzantine capital, Schlumberger, “the indescribable joy of the Greeks and Italians. For a moment Constantinople considered itself saved.”216 But this success, of course, could have no real importance for the outcome of the siege.
On April 22 the city with the Emperor at its head was struck by an extraordinary and terrifying spectacle: the Turkish vessels were in the upper part of the Golden Horn. During the preceding night the sultan had succeeded in transporting the vessels from the Bosphorus by land into the Golden Horn; for this purpose a kind of wooden platform had been specially made in the valley between the hills, and the vessels were put on wheels and dragged over the platform by the exertions of a great number of “canaille,” according to Barbaro,217 who were at the sultan’s disposal. The Greco-Italian fleet stationed in the Golden Horn beyond the chain was thereafter between two fires. The condition of the city became critical. The plan of the besieged garrison to burn the Turkish vessels in the Golden Horn at night was treacherously revealed to the sultan and prevented.
Meanwhile the heavy bombardment of the city, which did not cease for several weeks, brought the population to the point of complete exhaustion; men, women, children, priests, monks, and nuns were compelled, day and night, under cannon fire, to repair the numerous breaches in the walls. The siege had already lasted for fifty days. The tidings which reached the sultan, perhaps especially invented, of the possible arrival of a Christian fleet to aid the city, induced him to hasten the decisive blow to Constantinople. Imitating the famous orations in the history of Thucydides, Critobulus even gave the speech of Muhammed to the troops appealing to their courage and firmness; in this speech the sultan declared, “There are three conditions for successful war: to want (victory), to be ashamed (of dishonor, defeat), and to obey the leaders.”218 The assault was fixed for the night of May 29.
The old capital of the Christian East, anticipating the inevitable catastrophe and aware of the coming assault, spent the eve of the great day in prayer and tears. Upon the Emperor’s order, religious processions followed by an enormous multitude of people singing “O Lord, have mercy on us,” passed along the city walls. Men encouraged one another to offer a stubborn resistance to the Turks at the last hour of battle. In his long speech quoted by the Greek historian, Phrantzes,219 Constantine incited the people to a valorous defense, but he clearly realized their doom when he said that the Turks “are supported by guns, cavalry, infantry, and their numerical superiority, but we rely on the name of the Lord our God and Saviour, and, secondly, on our hands and the strength which has been granted us by the power of God.”220 Constantine ended his speech thus: “I persuade and beg your love to accord adequate honor and obedience to your chiefs, everyone according to his rank, his military position, and service. Know this: if you sincerely observe all that I have commanded you, I hope that, with the aid of God, we shall avoid the just punishment sent by God.”221 In the evening of the same day service was celebrated in St. Sophia, the last Christian ceremony in the famous church. On the basis of Byzantine sources an English historian, E. Pears, gave a striking picture of this ceremony:
The great ceremony of the evening and one that must always stand out among the world’s historic spectacles was the last Christian service held in the church of Holy Wisdom…. The emperor and such of the leaders as could be spared were present and the building was once more and for the last time crowded with Christian worshippers. It requires no great effort of imagination to picture the scene. The interior of the church was the most beautiful which Christian art had produced, and its beauty was enhanced by its still gorgeous fittings. Patriarch and cardinal, the crowd of ecclesiastics representing both the Eastern and Western churches; emperor and nobles, the last remnant of the once gorgeous and brave Byzantine aristocracy; priests and soldiers intermingled; Constantinopolitans, Venetians and Genoese, all were present, all realizing the peril before them, and feeling that in view of the impending danger the rivalries which had occupied them for years were too small to be worthy of thought. The emperor and his followers partook together of “the undefiled and divine mysteries,” and said farewell to the patriarch. The ceremony was in reality a liturgy of death. The empire was in its agony and it was fitting that the service for its departing spirit should be thus publicly said in its most beautiful church and before its last brave emperor. If the scene so vividly described by Mr. Bryce of the coronation of Charles the Great and the birth of an empire is among the most picturesque in history, that of the last Christian service in St. Sophia is surely among the most tragic.222
Phrantzes wrote: “Who will tell of the tears and groans in the palace! Even a man of wood or stone could not help weeping.”223
The general assault began on Tuesday night between one and two o’clock of May 28–29. At the given signal, the city was attacked simultaneously on three sides. Two attacks were repulsed. Finally, Muhammed organized very carefully the third and last attack. With particular violence the Turks attacked the walls close to the St. Romanus gate (or Pempton) where the Emperor was fighting. One of the chief defenders of the city, the Genoese Giustiniani, seriously wounded, was forced to abandon the battle; he was transported with difficulty to a vessel which succeeded in leaving the harbor for the Island of Chios. Either there or on the journey there Giustiniani died. His tomb is still preserved in Chios, but the Latin epitaph formerly in the church of S. Dominic in the citadel has apparently disappeared.224
The departure and death of Giustiniani was an irreparable loss to the besieged. In the walls more and more new breaches opened. The Emperor fought heroically as a simple soldier and fell in battle. No exact information exists about the death of the last Byzantine Emperor; for this reason his death soon became the subject of a legend which has obscured the historical fact.
After Constantine’s death, the Turks rushed into the city inflicting terrible devastation. A great multitude of Greeks took refuge in St. Sophia, hoping for safety there. But the Turks broke in the entrance gate and poured into the church; they murdered and insulted the Greeks who were hiding there, without distinction of sex or age. The day of the capture of the city, or perhaps the next day, the sultan solemnly entered conquered Constantinople, and went into St. Sophia, where he offered up a Muhammedan prayer. Thereupon Muhammed took up his residence in the imperial palace of Blachernae.
According to the unanimous indication of the sources, the pillage of the city, as Muhammed had promised his soldiers, lasted for three days and three nights. The population was mercilessly murdered. The churches, with St. Sophia at the head, and the monasteries with all their wealth were robbed and polluted; private property was plundered. In these fatal days an innumerable mass of cultural material perished. Books were burnt or torn to pieces, trodden upon or sold for practically nothing. According to the statement of Ducas, an enormous number of books were loaded upon carts and scattered through various countries; a great number of books, the works of Aristotle and Plato, books of theology, and many others, were sold for one gold coin; the gold and silver which adorned the beautifully bound Gospels was torn off, and the Gospels themselves were either sold or thrown away; all the holy images were burnt, and the Turks ate meat boiled on the fire.225 Nevertheless, some scholars, for example Th. Uspensky, believe that “the Turks in 1453 acted with more mildness and humanity than the crusaders who had seized Constantinople in 1204.”226
A popular Christian tradition relates that at the moment of the appearance of the Turks in St. Sophia the liturgy was being celebrated; when the priest who held the holy sacrament saw the Muslims rush into the church, the altar wall miraculously opened before him and he entered it and disappeared; when Constantinople passes again into the hands of the Christians, the priest will come out from the wall and continue the liturgy.
About sixty years ago the local guides used to show tourists, in one of the remote places of Stamboul, a tomb purporting to be that of the last Byzantine Emperor, over which a simple oil lamp was burning. But of course this nameless tomb is not really that of Constantine; his burial place is unknown. In 1895 E. A. Grosvenor wrote, “Today, in the quarter of Abou Vefa in Stamboul, may be seen a lowly, nameless grave which the humble Greeks revere as that of Constantine. Timid devotion has strewn around it a few rustic ornaments. Candles were kept burning night and day at its side. Till eight years ago it was frequented, though secretly, as a place of prayer. Then the Ottoman Government interposed with severe penalties, and it has since been almost deserted. All this is but in keeping with the tales which delight the credulous or devout.”227
It has usually been said that two days after the fall of Constantinople a western relief fleet arrived in the Archipelago, and learning the tidings of the fall of the city immediately sailed back again. On the basis of some new evidence, at the present time this fact is denied: neither papal vessels nor Genoese nor Aragonese sailed to the East in support of Constantinople.228
In 1456 Muhammed conquered Athens from the Franks;229 shortly after all Greece with the Peloponnesus submitted to him. The ancient Parthenon, in the Middle Ages the church of the Holy Virgin, was, on the sultan’s order, turned into a mosque. In 1461 the far-off Trebizond, capital of the once independent Empire, passed into the hands of the Turks. At the same time they took possession of the remnants of the Despotat of Epirus. The orthodox Byzantine Empire ceased to exist, and on its site the Muhammedan Ottoman (Othman) Empire was established and grew. Its capital was transferred from Hadrianople to Constantinople, which was called by the Turks Istamboul (Stamboul).230
Ducas, imitating the “lamentation” of Nicetas Acominatus after the sack of Constantinople by the Latins in 1204, bewailed the event of 1453. He began his lamentation:
O, city, city, head of all cities! O, city, city, center of the four quarters of the world! O, city, city, pride of the Christians and ruin of the barbarians! O, city, city, second paradise planted in the West, including all sorts of plants bending under the burden of spiritual fruits! Where is thy beauty, O, paradise? Where is the blessed strength of spirit and body of thy spiritual Graces? Where are the bodies of the Apostles of my Lord? … Where are the relics of the saints, where are the relics of the martyrs? Where is the corpse of the great Constantine and other Emperors….231
Another contemporary, the Polish historian Jan Dlugosz, wrote in his History of Poland:
This Constantinopolitan defeat, both miserable and deplorable, was the enormous victory of the Turks, the extreme ruin of the Greeks, the infamy of the Latins; through it the Catholic faith was wounded, religion confused, the name of Christ reviled and oppressed. One of the two eyes of Christianity was plucked out; one of the two hands was amputated, since the libraries were burnt down and the doctrines of Greek literature destroyed, without which no one considers himself a learned man.232
A far-off Georgian chronicler remarked piously, “On the day when the Turks took Constantinople, the sun was darkened.”233
The fall of Constantinople made a terrible impression upon western Europe, which first of all was seized with dismay at the thought of the future advances of the Turks. Moreover, the ruin of one of the chief centers of Christianity, schismatic though it was from the point of view of the Catholic Church, could not fail to arouse among the faithful of the West anger, horror, and zeal to repair the situation. Popes, sovereigns, bishops, princes, and knights left many epistles and letters portraying the whole horror of the situation and appealing for a crusade against victorious Islam and its representative, Muhammed II, this “precursor of Antichrist and second Sennacherib.”234 In many letters the ruin of Constantinople was lamented as that of a center of culture. In his appeal to Pope Nicholas V the western emperor, Frederick III, calling the fall of Constantinople “a general disaster to the Christian faith,” wrote that Constantinople was “a real abode [velut domicilium proprium] of literature and studies of all humanity.”235 Cardinal Bessarion, mourning the fall of the city, called it “a school of the best arts” (gymnasium optimarum artium).236 The famous Enea Silvio Piccolomini, the future Pope Pius II, calling to mind numberless books in Byzantium which were still unknown to the Latins, styled the Turkish conquest of the city the second death of Homer and Plato.237 Some writers named the Turks Teucrians (Teucri), considering them the descendants of the old Trojans, and warned Europe of the sultan’s plans to attack Italy, which allured him “by its wealth and by the tombs of his Trojan ancestors.”238 On one hand, various epistles of the fifth decade of the fifteenth century said that “the Sultan, like Julian the Apostate, will be finally forced to recognize the victory of Christ”; that Christianity, doubtless, is strong enough to have no fear of the Turks; that “a strong expedition [valida expeditio]” will be ready and the Christians will be able to defeat the Turks and “drive them out of Europe (fugare extra Europam).”But, on the other hand, some epistles anticipated the great difficulties in the coming struggle with the Turks and the chief cause of these difficulties—the discord among the Christians themselves, “a spectacle which inspires the Sultan with courage.”239 Enea Silvio Piccolomini gave in one of his letters an excellent and true picture of the Christian interrelations in the West at that time. He wrote:
I do not hope for what I want. Christianity has no longer a head: neither Pope nor Emperor is adequately esteemed or obeyed; they are treated as fictitious names and painted figures. Each city has a king of its own; there are as many princes as houses. How might one persuade the numberless Christian rulers to take up arms? Look upon Christianity! Italy, you say, is pacified. I do not know to what extent. The remains of war still exist between the King of Aragon and the Genoese. The Genoese will not fight the Turks: they are said to pay tribute to them! The Venetians have made a treaty with the Turks. If the Italians do not take part, we cannot hope for maritime war. In Spain, as you know, there are many kings of different power, different policy, different will, and different ideas; but these sovereigns who live in the far West can not be attracted to the East, especially when they are fighting with the Moors of Granada. The King of France has expelled his enemy from his kingdom; but he is still in trouble, and will not dare to send his knights beyond the borders of his kingdom for fear of a sudden landing of the English. As far as the English are concerned, they think only of taking revenge for their expulsion from France. Scotch, Danes, Swedes, and Norwegians, who live at the end of the world, seek nothing beyond their countries. The Germans are greatly divided and have nothing to unify them.240
Neither the appeals of popes and sovereigns, nor the lofty impulse of individuals and groups, nor the consciousness of common danger before the Ottoman menace could weld disunited western Europe for the struggle with Islam. The Turks continued to advance, and at the end of the seventeenth century they threatened Vienna. That was the climax of the might of the Ottoman Empire. They were turned back from Europe, but Constantinople, it is well known, even today is in the hands of the Turks.