Part 19

Michael Paleologus, though it was his fortune to recover the city which his abler predecessors had failed to take, was a mere wily intriguer, not a statesman or general. Having usurped the throne by the basest treachery towards his infant sovereign, he always feared for himself a similar fate. Suspicion and cruelty were his main characteristics, and in his care for his own person he quite forgot the interests of the State. Even contemporary chroniclers saw that he was deliberately setting himself to weaken the empire, because he dreaded the resentment of his subjects. He disbanded nearly all the native Greek troops, and refrained as far as possible from employing Greek generals.

One of his minor acts in this direction may be said to have been the original circumstance which set the Ottoman Turks, the future bane of the empire, on their career of conquest. The borders of the empire in Asia were defended by a native militia, who held their lands under condition of defending the castles and passes of the Bithynian and Phrygian mountains. The institution, which somewhat resembled a simple form of European feudalism, had worked so well that the Byzantine Empire had for a century and a half kept its Asiatic frontier practically intact, in spite of all the pressure of the Seljouk Turks of the Sultanate of Iconium. But the Bithynian militia were known to be attached to the house of Ducas, which Michael had dethroned, and he therefore resolved to disarm them. The measure was carried out, not without bloodshed, but the disbanded levy were not replaced by any adequate number of regular troops. Michael’s financial straits did not permit him to keep under arms a very large force, such as was required to garrison his eastern line of forts after the abolition of the previous machinery of defence. Ten years only before Othman, the father of the Ottoman Turks, succeeded to the petty principality which was destined to be the nucleus of the Turkish Empire, the way for him had been thrown open by Michael’s suspicious disarmament of the guards of his own frontier.

Michael lived for twenty-one years after the recovery of Constantinople, but he did not win a single important advantage in all the rest of his reign. In Europe he barely held his own against the Bulgarians, the Franks, and the fleets of Genoa and Venice. The troubles which befell him at the hands of the two naval powers were largely of his own creation, for he shifted his alliance from one to the other with such levity and suddenness that both regarded him as unfriendly. Though all through his reign he was at war either with Genoa or Venice, yet such was the distrust felt for him that, when at war with one of the rivals, he could not always secure the help of the other. Venice had been the mainstay of the Frank emperors of Constantinople, and Michael might, therefore, have been expected to remain staunch to the Genoese. On the other hand, the Genoese had designs on the Black Sea trade, which touched the Emperor’s pocket very closely, while the Venetians were more connected with the distant commerce of Syria and Egypt, which did not concern him. Balancing one consideration with the other, Michael played false to both the powers, and often saw his coast ravaged and his small fleet compelled to take refuge in the Golden Horn, while the enemy’s vessels swept the seas. On land he was less unlucky, and the Duke of Athens and the despot of Epirus were both kept in check, though neither of them were subdued.

But it was in Asia that Michael’s rule was most unfortunate. In the second half of his reign the Seljouks, though split into several principalities owing to the break up of the Sultanate of Iconium, united to assail the borders of the empire. They conquered the Carian and Lydian inland, though Tralles and several other towns made a vigorous resistance, and reduced Michael’s dominion in South-western Asia Minor to a mere strip along the coast. A similar fate befell Eastern Bithynia, where the Turks forced their way as far as the river Sangarius.

But the ruin of Byzantine Asia was reserved to fall into the times of Michael’s son and successor, Andronicus II. This prince had all the faults of his father, levity, perfidy, and cruelty, with others added from which Michael had been free—cowardice and superstition. The main interest which Andronicus took in life was concerned with things ecclesiastical—it would be wrong to say things religious—and he spent his life in making and unmaking patriarchs of Constantinople. No prelate could bear with him long, and in the course of his reign he deposed no less than nine of them.

While Andronicus was quarrelling with his patriarchs the empire was going to ruin. The Seljouk chiefs from the plateau of Asia Minor were pressing down more and more towards the coast, and making their way to the very gates of Ephesus and Smyrna. At last the emperor, growing seriously alarmed when the Turks appeared on the shores of the Propontis itself, and threatened the walls of Nicaea and Prusa, resolved to make an unwonted effort to beat them back.

Adronicus Paleologus Adoring Our Lord. (_From "L’Art Byzantin." Par Charles Bayet. Paris, Quantin, 1883._)

In 1302 the long war of the “Sicilian Vespers” between the houses of Anjou and Aragon came to an end, and the hordes of mercenaries of all nations which the two pretenders to the crown of Sicily had maintained were turned loose on the world. It occurred to Andronicus that he might hire enough of the veterans of the Sicilian war to enable him to beat back the Turks into their hills. All Europe acknowledged that they were the hardiest and best-disciplined troops in Christendom, though they were also the most cruel and lawless. Accordingly the emperor applied to Roger de Flor, a renegade Templar, the commander of the mercenaries who had served Frederic of Aragon, and offered to take him into his service, with as many of his followers as could be induced to accompany him. Roger accepted with alacrity, and came to Constantinople in 1303 with 6,000 men at his back; other bodies were soon to follow. Andronicus loaded the “Grand Company,” as Roger de Flor styled his men, with unlimited promises, and a certain amount of ready money. Roger himself was given the title of “Grand Duke,” and married to a lady of the imperial house. After clearing the Turks out of the Bithynian coast-land the “Grand Company” spent the winter of 1303-4 in free quarters along the southern coast of Propontis. Their plundering habits and their arrogance soon brought them into ill odour with the inhabitants, who complained that they were well-nigh as great a curse as the Turks. In the next year Roger moved south with his host, and drove the Turks out of Lydia and Caria; but instead of putting the emperor into possession of the reconquered land, he garrisoned every fortress with his own men, and raised and appropriated the imperial taxes. There can be little doubt that he was plotting to seize on the provinces he had regained, and to reign at Ephesus as an independent prince. At last Roger went so far as to lay formal siege to Philadelphia, because its inhabitants preferred to obey orders from Constantinople, and would not admit him within their gates. Andronicus then lured him to an interview at Adrianople, and in his very presence the great _condottiere_ was assassinated by George the Alan, an officer whose son had been slain in a brawl by Roger’s soldiers. The Emperor had probably arranged the murder, and certainly refused to arrest its perpetrator [1307].

He was promptly punished. The “Grand Company” was not disorganized by the loss of its leader, and thought of nothing but revenge. Assembling themselves in haste, and abandoning Asia Minor to the Turks, they marched on Constantinople, harrying the land far and wide with fiendish cruelty. The Emperor sent his son Michael against them, but the young prince was disgracefully beaten in two fights at Gallipoli and Apros, and the mercenaries spread themselves all over Thrace and plundered it up to the gates of the capital. It almost looked as if a second Latin Conquest of Constantinople was about to take place, for the leaders of the “Grand Company” got succour from Europe, raised a corps of Turkish auxiliaries, and occupied Thrace for two years. But they could not storm the walls of Constantinople or Adrianople, and at last, after two years of plundering, they had stripped the country so bare that they were driven away by famine. Drifting southward and westward they ravaged Macedon and Thessaly, and at last reached Greece. Here they fell into a quarrel with Walter de Brienne, Duke of Athens, slew him in battle and took his capital. Then at last did the wandering horde settle down; they seized the duchy, divided its fiefs among themselves, and established a new dynasty on the Athenian throne. The empire was at last quit of them, for when once they ceased to wander the “Grand Company” ceased to be dangerous.

This disastrous war with the mercenaries not only ruined Thrace and Macedonia, but was the cause of the final loss of the Byzantine provinces of Asia Minor. While Andronicus was feebly attempting to cope with the “Grand Company,” the Seljouk chiefs had conquered Lydia and Phrygia once more, and then advanced yet further north to siege Mysia and Bithynia. By 1325 they had reduced the Emperor’s dominions on the east of the straits to a narrow strip, reaching from the Dardanelles to the northern exit of the Bosphorus, and bounded by the Bithynian hills to the south. Five Seljouk leaders had carved out for themselves principalities in the conquered districts, Menteshe in the south, Aidin and Saroukhan in Lydia, Karasi in Mysia, and in the Bithynian borderland Othman, destined to a fame very different from that of his long-forgotten compeers.

While Othman and the rest were turning the once thickly-peopled countries of Western Asia Minor into a desert sparsely inhabited by wandering nomads, Andronicus II. was busied in a war even more uncalled for than that with the mercenaries. He wished to exclude from the succession to the throne his grandson and heir, who bore the same name as himself. But the younger Andronicus took measures to defend his rights, and raised armed bands. Grandfather and grandson were ere long engaged in a long but feebly-conducted war, which was only terminated in 1328, when the old man acknowledged Andronicus the younger as his heir, and made him his colleague on the throne. But his grandson, not contented with this measure of success, made him retire from the conduct of affairs, and assumed control over every function of government. The name of Andronicus II. was still associated with that of Andronicus III. on the coinage and in the public prayers, but he took no further part in the rule of the empire. In 1332 he died, at a good old age, lamented by no single individual in the realm which he had ruled for fifty years. At his death the empire was only two-thirds of the size that it had been at his accession.

XXV. THE TURKS IN EUROPE.

Andronicus III. was a shade better than the incapable old man whom he supplanted. Though he was given—like all his house—to treachery and deceit, and though his life was loose and luxurious, he was at any rate active and energetic. He may be described as a weak reflection or copy of Manuel Comnenus, being a mighty hunter, a bold spear both in the tournament and on the battle-field, and a great spender of money. If he had not the brains to keep his empire together, he at any rate fought his best, and did not sit apathetically at home like his grandfather while everything was going to rack and ruin.

Nevertheless, Andronicus III. was destined to see the termination of the process which had begun under Andronicus II.—the entire loss of the Asiatic provinces of the empire to the Turks. It was now with the Ottomans almost exclusively that he had to deal; the other Seljouk hordes had no longer any marchland along the shrunken frontier of his dominions.

These new foes of the empire deserve a word of description. Othman, the son of Ertogrul, was a vassal of the Seljouk Sultan of Roum, who had been granted a tract in the Phrygian highlands under the condition of military service against the Greeks. His fief lay in the north-west angle of the great central plateau of Asia Minor. Behind it lay the rolling country of hills and uplands already occupied by the Seljouks. Before it were the Bithynian mountains, with their passes protected by forts, and garrisoned by local militia, till the day when they were so perversely stripped of their defenders by the action of Michael Paleologus. Othman, and his father Ertogrul before him, owned nothing in the hills, nor could they have pushed on if Michael had not made the way easy for them. But after 1270 the native militia was gone, and the followers of Othman, instead of having to face an armed population, fighting to protect its own fields, found to oppose them only inadequate garrisons of regular troops at long intervals.

Othman’s life covered two series of great events, the disastrous reign of Andronicus II. at Constantinople, and in Asia Minor the no less disastrous break-up of the power of his own suzerain, the Sultan of Roum. In 1294, Gaiaseddin, the last undisputed sovereign of the Seljouk line, fell in battle against rebels; and in 1307, Alaeddin III., the last prince who claimed to be supreme Sultan, died in exile. This made Othman an independent prince; but he did not take the title of Sultan, contenting himself with the humbler name of Emir.

Othman’s field of operation from 1281 to 1326 was the Byzantine borderland of Bithynia and Mysia. He was by no means the strongest of the Seljouk chiefs who made a lodgement within the borders of the empire, and it took him twenty years before he conquered one large town. His wild horsemen harried the open sea-coast plain of Bithynia again and again, till at last the wretched inhabitants emigrated, or acknowledged him as their sovereign. But the towns, within their strong Roman walls, were unassailable by the light cavalry which formed his only armed strength. The siege of Prusa [Broussa], the capital and key of the region, lasted ten years. The Turks built a chain of forts around it and gradually made the introduction of provisions more and more difficult, till at last a large force was required to march out every time that a convoy was expected. At length the inhabitants could find no advantage in spending their whole lives in a beleaguered town undergoing slow starvation. Prusa surrendered in 1326, and Othman heard of the news on his death-bed. The Turkish frontier now once again touched the Sea of Marmora, which it had not reached since the Crusaders thrust it back inland in 1097.

The reign of Othman’s son Orkhan, the second Emir of the Ottomans, almost coincided with that of Andronicus III. All that the one lost the other gained. Orkhan’s life-work was the completion of the conquest of Bithynia, which his father had begun. He took Nicomedia in 1327 and Nicaea in 1333, with all the surrounding territory, so that Andronicus retained nothing but Chalcedon and the district immediately facing Constantinople beyond the Bosphorus. Only once did he have to meet the Emperor in pitched battle; this was at the fight of Pelekanon in 1329. Andronicus was wounded early in the day, and his army, deprived of its leader went to pieces and was severely beaten. After his recovery from his wounds the Emperor never faced the Ottomans again.

After conquering Bithynia, Orkhan subdued his nearest neighbours among the other Seljouk Emirs, and then turned to organizing his state. This was the date of the institution of his famous corps of the Janissaries, the first steady infantry that any Eastern power had ever possessed. He imposed on his Christian subjects in Mysia and Bithynia a tribute, not of money, but of male children. The boys were taken over while very young, placed in barracks, educated in the strictest and most fanatical Moslem code, and trained to the profession of arms. Having light horse enough and to spare, Orkhan taught the Janissaries to fight on foot with bow and sabre. They were well drilled, and moved in compact masses, which for many ages no foe proved competent to sunder and disperse. So thorough was the physical and moral discipline to which the Janissaries were subjected, that it was almost unknown for one of them to turn back from his career and relapse into Christianity. To keep them firm in their allegiance there acted not only the military and conventual discipline to which they were subject, but the dazzling prospect of future greatness. The Ottoman sovereigns made it their rule to select their generals and governors, their courtiers and personal attendants from the ranks of the tribute-children. It was calculated that more than two-thirds of the Grand-Viziers of Turkey, in the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries, had begun their career as Janissaries.

The first generation of the “New Soldiery” [for such is the meaning of the word Janissary] grew up to the military age during the latter half of the reign of Orkhan, and it was he who first utilized them on the European shore of the Bosphorus.

Andronicus III. died in 1241, and left his shrunken dominions to the risks of a minority, for his son and heir, John III., was only nine years of age. If anything had been wanting to aid in the destruction of the empire, it was the arrival of such a contingency. The usual troubles soon set in, and the inevitable civil war was not far off.

John Cantacuzenus Sitting In State. (_From a Contemporary MS._) (_From "L’Art Byzantin." Par C. Bayet. Paris, Quantin, 1883._)

The evil spirit of the time was John Cantacuzenus, the prime minister of the deceased emperor. He was a clever, shifty, intriguing courtier, with a turn for literature, but had the abilities neither of a general nor of a statesman. However, he had read the tale of the rise of the Paleologi to some purpose, and had resolved to imitate the career of Michael VIII. Now, as in 1258, there was the best of chances for an unscrupulous minister to make himself first the colleague and then the supplanter of his young master. Cantacuzenus did his best to repeat the doings of Michael on Michael’s great-great-grandson. He bribed and intrigued, made himself a party in the state, and prepared for a _coup d’état_ when the time should be ripe. Unfortunately for himself, Cantacuzenus was not of the stuff of which successful usurpers are made. He had his scruples and superstitions, and showed a fatal habit of procrastination which always led him to act a day too late. The Empress Dowager, Anne of Savoy, succeeded in raising a party against him, and when he threw off the mask and declared himself emperor he found himself unable to seize the capital, though he mustered an army under its walls. Finding that he was playing a losing game, Cantacuzenus took the usual step of calling in the national enemy to aid him. It was for the last time that this was done in Byzantine history, but never before had the result been so fatal. The usurper summoned to his aid first Stephen Dushan, the king of the Servians, and a little later the Turkish princes from across the Aegean—Orkhan the son of Othman, and his rival, Amour, Emir of Aidin.

These allies kept the cause of John Cantacuzenus from destruction, but it was by destroying the empire that John had coveted. King Stephen entered Macedonia and Thrace, and occupied the whole countryside, except Thessalonica and a few other towns. He then pushed further south, conquered Thessaly, and made the despot of Epirus do him homage. The Byzantine government retained little more than the capital, and the districts round Adrianople and Thessalonica. Most of this country was lost for ever to the imperial crown, and it seemed as if a Servian domination in the Balkan Peninsula was about to begin, for Stephen moved south from Servia, made Uscup in Macedonia his capital, and proclaimed himself “Emperor of the Servians and Romans.”

It would perhaps have been well for Christendom if Stephen had actually conquered Constantinople and made an end of the empire. In that case there would have been a single great power in the Balkan Peninsula, ready to meet the oncoming assault of the Turks. But Dushan was not strong enough to take the great city, and to the misfortune of Europe he died in 1355 leaving a realm extending from the Danube to the pass of Thermopylae. But his young son Urosh was soon assassinated, and the Servian Empire broke up as rapidly as it had grown together. A dozen princes were soon scrambling for the remnants of Stephen’s heritage.

The other allies whom John Cantacuzenus called in were the Turks Amour and Orkhan, and on them he depended far more than on the Servian. He took over into Thrace a large body of Turkish horse, and allowed them to harry the country-side and carry away his subjects by thousands, to be sold in the slave-markets of Smyrna and Broussa. But the depth of John’s degradation was reached when he gave his daughter Theodora to Orkhan, to be immured in the Turk’s harem. Thrace was rapidly assuming the aspect of a desert under the incursions of the Ottoman mercenaries of Cantacuzenus, when after six years of war the party of the Empress Anne consented to recognize the usurper as the colleague and guardian of the rightful heir. A hollow peace was patched up, and the two Johns could take stock of their dilapidated realm [1347]. The net result of their civil war had been that Macedonia and Thessaly were in Servian hands, and that Thrace was utterly ruined by the Turks. There was nothing left that could be called an empire; all that remained was Constantinople and Adrianople, the town of Thessalonica and the Byzantine province in the Peloponnesus. Cantacuzenus certainly deserves a notable place by the side of Isaac and Alexius Angelus, as the third of the great destroyers of the Eastern Empire.

But his evil work was not yet done. For seven years he ruled in conjunction with John Paleologus, waging an unsuccessful war against Servia in the hopes of winning back Dushan’s conquests. But in 1354 the young emperor, having attained the age of twenty-four, resolved to assert himself, and took arms to dethrone his guardian. Cantacuzenus resisted, and sent over to Asia for the troops of his son-in-law Orkhan, who crossed into Thrace and drove the adherents of the Paleologi out of several fortresses. But a night surprise from the side of the sea put John Paleologus in possession of Constantinople, and by a fortunate chance he got Cantacuzenus himself into his hands. The usurper was, in accordance with the usual practice, tonsured and placed in a monastery; by exceptional good fortune he was spared the loss of his eyes, and was able to spend the remainder of his life in writing a history of his own time.

But it was of little use to sweep away Cantacuzenus while Orkhan’s Turks were in Thrace. The Ottomans had come as auxiliaries in the war, but they were resolved to stop as principals. Suleiman, the son of Orkhan, seized Gallipoli for himself, filled it with Turkish families, and made it a permanent settlement. This was the first Ottoman foothold in Europe, but it was not long to remain isolated.