CHAPTER III

MURAD

THE OSMANLIS LAY THE FOUNDATIONS OF AN EMPIRE IN EUROPE

The use of Ottoman mercenaries in the Byzantine civil wars was fatal to the Empire. From the very fact that they were Osmanlis and mercenaries, the auxiliaries of Cantacuzenos were dangerous allies for a man who claimed to be fighting for his fatherland. The fertile valleys which Bulgarian and Serbian had so long disputed with Greek fired the imagination of these ambitious adventurers. The conquest of Macedonia and Thrace seemed to them as feasible as it was worth while. For they had a revelation of the weakness of the Balkan peoples that could have come to them in no other way. It was as if Cantacuzenos had said to Orkhan and his followers: Here is our country. You see how rich it is. You see how we hate each other, race striving with race, faction with faction. We have no patriotism. We have no rulers or leaders actuated by other than purely selfish motives. Our religion means no more to us than does our fatherland. Here are our military roads. We give you the opportunity of becoming acquainted with the easiest routes, of learning the best methods of provisioning. We initiate you into the art of besieging our cities and our strongholds. Under our guidance, you discover the vulnerable places in the walls of our fortresses.

Murad had not enjoyed training in leadership and responsibility to fit him for his sudden accession to the chieftainship of the Osmanlis. He had been overshadowed by the heir apparent, and never dreamed of ruling. Soleiman pasha, brilliant captain and idol of the army, would not have brooked a rival in popular favour. When Orkhan died, two months after the fatal fall of his eldest son at Bulaïr, Murad was elevated to the emirship before he had had time to adjust himself to his new fortunes. But he could not pause to get his bearings. The army was on the march. The conquest of Thrace had already been started.

Osman and Orkhan were able to build up a race and a nation without notice and, consequently, without hindrance. For their little corner of Asia Minor had been abandoned by the Byzantines. Since the days when Nicaea became the capital of the empire, after the Latin conquest of Constantinople, its commercial relations with Europe were interrupted. None knew or cared about the rise of the Osmanlis until they appeared in Thrace. Orkhan had assured himself of his inheritance by patient waiting. Of Murad immediate action was demanded.

The actual European conquests of Orkhan, outside of the Thracian Chersonese, had been negligible. But Europe was excited over the capture of Gallipoli. Murad had little to fear from a union of the indigenous Balkan elements. Greek and Serbian and Bulgarian hate each other far worse than they hate the Osmanli. This fact of history, demonstrated so forcibly by the events of the year 1913, was known and appreciated at its full value by the earliest of the Ottoman conquerors. There was, however, just cause for apprehension of the intervention of Hungary in conjunction with the Serbians, or of Venice in conjunction with the Byzantines. Murad’s success depended upon his ability to gain an immediate and vital foothold in the Balkan peninsula.

This foothold was obtained in the epoch-making campaign of 1360-1. Astounding success attended the initial efforts of Murad. If he were not himself a trained and seasoned warrior, he had a precious legacy of generals in whom he could put implicit trust. Realizing his own inexperience, he created Kara Khalil Tchenderli vizier, and allowed himself to be guided by the judgement of this tried friend and servant of his grandfather and his father. To Lalashahin, companion of Soleiman in the capture of Tzympe, was given the title of beylerbey, and chief command of the army in Thrace. Adrianople was the goal. To Evrenos bey Murad entrusted a second army, whose mission was to prevent an attack from the Serbians in the west.[248]

Tchorlu was the first objective point, because its capture would protect the rear of the army operating against Adrianople. This city, only forty-six miles from Constantinople, offered a stubborn resistance, and had to be taken by assault. The commandant was decapitated, the garrison massacred, and the walls razed.[249] The Osmanlis saw to it that the fate of the defenders of Tchorlu was heralded far and wide, so that it might serve as a lesson to other cities before which their armies appeared. Evrenos bey, pushing forward on the left, occupied Demotika,[250] and then Gumuldjina. This operation gave to the Osmanlis control of the basin of the Maritza River, and removed the danger of a Serbian attack. A column on the right moved up the coast of the Black Sea and captured Kirk Kilisse, a position of extreme strategic importance in preventing a possible Bulgarian attempt to relieve Adrianople by bringing an army through the mountainous country between the river and the sea.[251]

After the capture of Tchorlu, Murad advanced to Lule Burgas on the north bank of the Ergene, where he effected a junction with the armies of Evrenos and Lalashahin. The decisive battle was fought between Bunar Hissar and Eski Baba, to which point the defenders of Adrianople had

advanced.[252] The Byzantines and Bulgarians were defeated. The Greek commandant of Adrianople, with a portion of his army, managed to flee down the Maritza to Enos.[253] it is one of the remarkable coincidences of history that the Osmanlis should have won the first battle which opened up to them their glorious future in Europe in exactly the same place that was to witness five hundred and fifty years later their last desperate stand in the Balkan peninsula.

Deserted by their commandant, and overwhelmed by the disaster of Eski Baba, the inhabitants of Adrianople opened their gates to the Osmanlis.[254] Murad installed Lalashahin in Adrianople, and took up his own head-quarters in Demotika,[255] where he built a palace and a mosque. Lalashahin, before settling down in Adrianople, carried his victorious arms up the valley of the Maritza as far as Philippopolis, which he fortified strongly. A stone bridge was built across the river.[256] The occupation of Philippopolis not only gave to the Osmanlis an advantageous base of operations against the Bulgarians, but also brought them the most fruitful source of revenue they had yet enjoyed. It enabled them to levy taxes upon the rice-growing industry. Bulgarians and Serbians were both dependent upon the harvests of the rice fields around Philippopolis.

II

In fifteen months the Osmanlis had become masters of the principal strategic points in Thrace. This great campaign, undertaken and carried through under the spur of necessity, was an auspicious beginning for the reign of Murad and for the supremacy of the Osmanlis in the Balkan peninsula. Europe was suffering from another visitation of the Black Death.[257] The Balkan nations were completely demoralized. So unpopular was John Palaeologos in his own capital that Murad contemplated entering into a conspiracy with some Byzantine traitors to have John assassinated and complete the conquest of the empire.[258] If he did enter fully into this plot, it was as fortunate for him that the undertaking failed as it was for the Bulgarians in 1912 that their columns did not pierce the lines of Ottoman defence at Tchataldja. For the disaster that follows a too extended and too rapid subjugation of unassimilated masses is as sudden as it is irreparable. Durable empire-building is governed by a law of homogeneity.

The Osmanlis were still a race of limited numbers, and at the beginning of their existence as a nation. The process of assimilating the racial elements in conquered territories, begun by Osman when he first left the village of Sugut, could not be arrested; for the existence of the Ottoman state depended upon its continuance. The Greek of Bithynia had lived with Turk and Moslem for two centuries, and had found him a good neighbour. There was neither racial antipathy nor abhorrence of the religion of Mohammed to overcome. Nor had there been the hatred and dread of the conquered on the one side and the arrogance of the conqueror on the other. The Anatolian Greeks had been accustomed for generations to the economic and political conditions that finally caused the majority of them to cast their fortunes with the rising star of the Osmanlis.

The problem of assimilating the Christians, who formed the total population of the Balkan peninsula, was a new one. Here were huge and compact masses of Christians, who had come suddenly under the yoke of the Osmanlis in the first two years of Murad’s reign. They did not know their new masters. They did not know Islam. Benevolent assimilation by voluntary conversion seemed no longer possible. A radical change in the attitude of the Osmanlis towards the question of religion was demanded. Wholesale massacre was impracticable, for the Osmanlis had no reserve of colonists to call upon to replace the indigenous elements. Their position was still too precarious to allow them to draw freely from their adherents in the corner of Asia Minor under their dominion. To win the Macedonians and Thracians by forcible conversion was not feasible. It required the expenditure of all his military resources for Murad to hold what he had conquered. He could not add police duty to his already superhuman burden. Even had he thought of this method of conversion, he would have been deterred by the nightmare of a crusade.

Murad and his counsellors solved the problem of assimilation by sanctioning the reduction of captives to slavery, and by creating the corps of janissaries.

A law was promulgated which gave to the Osmanli soldier absolute right to the possession of prisoners, unless they consented to profess and practise Islam. Prisoners were regarded as booty. They could be kept for domestic or agricultural labour, or sold in the open market, subject to the government’s equity of one in five. The disgrace, even more than the hardships, of slavery was so keenly felt by the Greeks[259] that many for whom there was no other way preferred a change of religion to loss of freedom. The right to make slaves of prisoners was efficacious in providing wives and concubines for the conquerors, who were practically without women of their own. The widows of the fallen, and the daughters of Greeks, Serbians, and Bulgarians, became the instruments of increasing the Ottoman race. In the hundred years from Murad I to Mohammed II, the Osmanlis became in blood the most cosmopolitan and vigorous race the world had known since the days of the Greeks and Romans. Greek, Turkish, Serbian, Bulgarian, Albanian, Armenian, Wallachian, Hungarian, German, Italian, Russian, Tartar, Mongol, Circassian, Georgian, Persian, Syrian, and Arabian--this was the ancestry of the Osmanlis who, under Soleiman the Magnificent, made the whole world tremble. In richness of blood the only parallel to the Osmanlis in modern times is the present population of the United States and Canada.

But this indirect method of conversion as an alternative to slavery did not immediately increase the masculine element among the Osmanlis. In a city taken by assault the more virile portion of the male population was killed off, and those who remained were able to buy life and freedom. Male slaves were an embarrassment to the ever-moving armies of Murad. Ransom money was welcomed by the captors. In many cities the inhabitants surrendered without a struggle, and were secured in their freedom by the terms of capitulation. In rural districts the threat of slavery was little felt. The Osmanlis had neither time nor strength to put out the drag-net. Everywhere in the Balkans refuge in the mountains is easy. Then, too, the loss of cultivators would have made the highly prized timarets worthless, and would have caused a famine in foodstuffs or a diminution of taxes on harvests. Another means of bringing pressure to bear upon the Christians had to be devised.

The famous corps of the janissaries was, according to the Ottoman historians, a creation of Orkhan.[260] As a bodyguard of slaves, cut off from their families and educated and trained to serve nearest the person of the sovereign, the janissaries may have originated with Orkhan. If so, it was but the adoption of the idea already put into practice by the sovereigns of Egypt in the organization of the Mamelukes.[261] But as an agency of forcible conversion by the incorporation of Christian youths in the Ottoman army, there is no evidence of its existence before Murad. In fact, historians are agreed that the janissaries were recruited only from the Christian population in Europe.[262] So Orkhan could hardly have conceived this scheme. The problem of which it was a solution did not arise until after Orkhan’s death.

That the corps of the janissaries was an agency for forcible conversion, and was not created in order to increase the strength and efficiency of the Ottoman army, is proved by the records we have of the number of janissaries in the early days of Ottoman history. Murad and Bayezid are represented as having a thousand or less janissaries. In the confusion of the ten years of civil strife among the sons of Bayezid, the janissaries played no part. There were only twelve hundred janissaries in the time of Mohammed the Conqueror,[263] and twelve thousand when the Ottoman Empire was at its zenith under Soleiman the Magnificent.[264] But Mahmud II counted one hundred and forty thousand in his army.[265] These figures show that this most celebrated of Ottoman military organizations did not become a powerful factor until the period of decadence. The janissaries were not, as has been commonly represented, the principal element of the Osmanlis’ fighting strength in the wars of conquest of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Their great rôle in Ottoman history was that of maintainers and defenders of conquests already made. In organizing the janissaries, Murad was certainly influenced by the desire of forming a bodyguard on whose loyalty and devotion he could rely implicitly. But his principal purpose was to emasculate the Christian elements in Macedonia and Thrace, which were too fanatical or too ignorant to see of their own accord that self-interest should lead them to renounce their nationality and their religion.

Murad’s law of drafting (_devchurmé_) provided that in each conquered district in Europe the privilege of exemption from military service through the payment of the capitation tax (_kharadj_) should be denied to Christian youths. The Osmanlis reserved the right to select at discretion Christian boys, who were taken from home and kindred and brought up in the Mohammedan religion. They were trained for service as the Sultan’s bodyguard. They depended directly upon the sovereign, who paid them according to a definite scale. Their insignia were the pot and the spoon, and their officers received names which symbolized the functions of the camp kitchen.[266]

One is compelled to dissent from the consensus of opinion of European historians on the organization of the janissaries. Their scathing criticisms are best summed up in the words of a French historian: ‘It is the most fearful tribute of human flesh that has ever been levied by victors upon the vanquished.... It justifies the execration of which the Osmanlis have been the object on the part of Europeans during centuries. Let us add that, by this strange mode of recruiting, the Osmanlis have found, at the same time, the means of taking away from the Christian populations their most virile element, and of doubling their troops without putting arms into the hands of the conquered.’[267]

The actual number of janissaries under arms refutes the latter part of this criticism, when it is applied to any one of the Ottoman sovereigns of the period of conquest. As for putting arms into the hands of the conquered, we shall see that both Murad and Bayezid availed themselves of the services in war of their Christian subjects, led by their own princes. The tearing away of boys from their homes, and the loss of their Christian heritage, is a shock to humanitarian and religious sensibilities. But we must judge the Osmanlis of Murad and Bayezid by the Christians of their own century. When we compare the methods of conquest of the Osmanlis with those of the Spaniards against the Moors, of the English against the French and Scotch, of the Italians against each other, we must concede that Murad devised a humane, clever, and highly successful scheme in the institution of the janissaries.

The ignorant Balkan peasantry--especially the Slavic elements--prized their sons far more highly than their daughters. Recruiting for the army was a greater blow to them than recruiting for the harem. It was the strong, sturdy son who was chosen. This touched the pocket-book as well as the heart-strings. The Anatolian Greek, especially of the cities, had been deterred from becoming a Moslem more by a lack of eagerness to assume military obligations than by a zeal for his ancestral faith. The Macedonian Greek, the Bulgarian, and the Serbian regarded the bearing of arms as a natural obligation. Fighting was a part of living. Better the faith of Mohammed, then, than the loss of the son’s help with the harvest. That there were wholesale conversions to Islam as a result of the threat to apply the law of _devchurmé_ is a logical inference from the fact that Murad never mustered more than a thousand janissaries.

III

The Byzantine Empire did not recover, even temporarily, from the effect of Murad’s first campaign in Europe. The fall of Demotika and Adrianople, followed so closely by that of Philippopolis, removed within eighteen months the last hope of retrieving the fortunes of the empire. There were still many places remaining to the Byzantines in Thrace. But the surrender of the fortresses in the valleys of the Ergene and the Maritza had destroyed the military prestige of the Byzantines, and foreshadowed the speedy subjugation of the whole country. The loss of the revenues of Thrace and of the great plain south of the main Balkan range reduced the imperial treasury to dependence upon the port duties and city taxes of Salonika and Constantinople. For ninety years the shadow of the empire remained. But whatever power, whatever influence was left to the successors of Constantine, it was rather in western Europe than in the Balkan peninsula. The impress of one thousand and thirty years of continuous existence from the renaming of old Byzantium to the fall of Adrianople was too deep to vanish in a few years. The decay had been going on for centuries. The final extinction would of necessity take several generations.

The complete abasement of the Byzantines is revealed in the treaty that John V Palacologos was compelled to conclude with Murad shortly after the capture of Philippopolis. In the fall of 1362 or the spring of 1363, John bound himself to refrain from any attempt to win back what he had lost in Thrace, either by a separate attack or by joining the Serbians or other enemies of the Osmanlis. In addition he promised to aid Murad against his Anatolian enemies, the Turkish emirs.[268]

After this treaty was signed, Murad withdrew to Brusa in order to provide for the organization of the new possessions that had come to him by a successful expedition against Angora. His letters, written at this time to announce to his Anatolian neighbours and to the Moslem princes of Asia the victories in Thrace, show clearly that he did not yet feel himself strong enough to assume the position of overlord to the other great emirs of Asia Minor. While he was in Brusa, in the spring of 1363, an event happened which led Murad to make the momentous decision that shaped the destinies of the Ottoman Empire. The first coalition against the Osmanlis was formed in Europe.

IV

After the fall of Philippopolis, the Greek commandant had succeeded in escaping, and took refuge with Kral Urosh V of Serbia.[269] He pointed out to Urosh most eloquently the paucity of numbers of the Osmanlis, their insecure position, and the danger that would overwhelm the Serbians if they waited until the Osmanlis were firmly grounded in Thrace. Urged by Pope Urban V, the princes of Wallachia and Bosnia, together with King Louis of Hungary, joined the Serbians in upper Macedonia. Under the guidance of the Greek refugee, they started on a swift march to win back Adrianople. It was an expedition undertaken as a crusade. The allies mustered at least twenty thousand.

Lalashahin had hardly more than twelve thousand men under his command, and a portion of these were scattered in the captured cities. Murad, who had started to return to Thrace as soon as he had heard the news, was detained by the necessity of capturing a fortress on the Sea of Marmora, near Cyzicus, which was in the hands of a turbulent band of second-generation Catalans, whom he feared to leave behind him.[270] They were suspected of plotting with his southern rivals to organize a movement against his Anatolian possessions.

If the Greeks had had the power or the will to co-operate with the crusaders, the Ottoman domination in Thrace would have ended even more suddenly than it had begun. But they made no move. In fact, one of the Byzantine historians charges John Palaeologos with aiding the Osmanlis![271] Lalashahin was able to draw from the garrisons of the recently occupied cities, and to send forward to meet the crusaders some ten thousand men under Hadji Ilbeki. It was the intention of Lalashahin to have this army act wholly on the defensive. If only Hadji Ilbeki could prevent their passing the Maritza, they would be turned southward towards Enos. By that time he felt sure that he could rely upon one of three things happening: dissensions would arise among the crusaders, the Greeks would be alarmed by the Serbian approach to Enos and the sea and attack the crusaders, or Murad would have time to bring his army across the Dardanelles. The one purpose of Lalashahin was to prevent the invasion of Thrace and the investment of Adrianople.

But Hadji Ilbeki did better than keep the crusaders from crossing the river. They had already crossed, and had celebrated the unopposed passage of the Maritza by an evening of feasting. Hadji Ilbeki surprised them as they were sleeping in a drunken stupor.[272] Without hesitation he fell upon them like a Gideon. Seized with panic, the crusaders were driven back into the river. Those who escaped massacre and drowning fled precipitately. There was no attempt to rally. In the little town of Mariazell, on the northern frontier of Styria near the foot of the Semmering Alps, there stands a votive church built by Louis out of gratitude to the Virgin for having saved him from death in this battle.[273]

Lalashahin, instead of rewarding the daring of his lieutenant, which had saved the Osmanlis from an irreparable disaster, was consumed with jealous fury. His only thought when he received the news was that Hadji Ilbeki had robbed him of the glory of so great a victory. He had his too successful subordinate poisoned.[274]

The sudden and complete collapse of the first crusade organized against the Osmanlis did not give to Murad any false sense of security. He saw in the successful meeting of this danger, which had threatened to destroy him, not the opportunity for exultation and for the relaxation of effort, but the spur for straining still further every nerve to learn and profit by the lesson. The battle of the Maritza was a warning to Murad. The danger would be renewed, and renewed soon. It was now for him to make the choice between remaining an Asiatic emir and becoming a European sovereign, between endeavouring to impose first his authority on the other emirs of Asia Minor and the conquest of the Balkan peninsula. Were the Osmanlis to be on the offensive in Europe or in Asia?

Murad decided to build his empire in the Balkan peninsula. It was not that he coveted less the mountains and valleys of Asia Minor. It was not that his ambitions failed to extend to the Taurus. But he had the vision to realize that the Ottoman race could not subjugate the Turkish elements in Asia Minor by a gradual assimilation of those elements alone. The race had to grow, as it began, by the incorporation of the various Christian elements, which alone possessed the finesse, the knowledge of government, the organizing capacity necessary to cope with the problems of facing Europe and inheriting the Byzantine Empire. From Europe, Asia Minor and more could be conquered: from Asia, no portion of Europe could be conquered.

The Osmanlis do not possess written records of the reign of Murad. There is no source to which we can go to read what Murad thought or what others of his day thought or said that he thought. But we know his mind from his actions. There is no cause for doubt on this point. After the first campaign in Thrace, Murad had returned to Brusa, and dated his letters from there. He began to plan an aggressive campaign against his neighbours. But after the battle of the Maritza, he abandoned Brusa for Demotika, and three years later, in 1366, Adrianople became the first real capital of the Ottoman Empire.

In spite of all that has been written about the unique position of Brusa in Ottoman history, it is no more to the Osmanlis than is Saint-Denis to the French or Winchester to the English. The Osmanlis have never really been at home in Constantinople. Historically and architecturally speaking, they have been under the shadow of a greater past. Adrianople, although always a city of importance since the days of Hadrian, reached its greatest splendour and glory under the Ottoman sultans. Here were planned, and from here started, the expeditions westward and eastward, which increased in strength, in efficiency, and in inspiring terror as the circle gradually widened, until the star and crescent appeared under the walls of Vienna and Cairo, on the shores of Italy and in the heart of Persia. No student of Ottoman annals can fail to support the contention of the Sublime Porte after the last Balkan war, that Adrianople is to the Osmanlis their sacred city. From Lalashahin to Shukri pasha, the proudest and most precious memories of the Osmanlis are in Adrianople, whose great mosque, still awe-inspiring and altogether admirable in its decay, is typical both of what has been and what is.

The decision of Murad was accepted by his successors. Even after the capture of Constantinople, many an Ottoman sultan felt more at home in Adrianople than in the imperial city. For more than a century the Osmanlis directed their energies almost exclusively to European conquests. Whatever they accomplished in Asia was the indirect result of their stupendous successes in Europe. From first to last, the extension of Ottoman sovereignty over the Moslems of Asia was by means of a soldiery gathered and war-hardened in Europe, themselves Christian or of Christian ancestry, in whose veins ran the blood of Greek and Roman, of Goth and Hun, of Albanian and Slav.

V

In 1365, Murad received from the outside world the first acknowledgement of his commanding position as heir apparent of the Byzantine Empire. It was an overture from the flourishing republic of Ragusa, on the Dalmatian coast, for a treaty guaranteeing freedom of trade in the Ottoman dominions to the merchants of Ragusa. In return for unrestricted commercial privileges, the republic offered to pay a large sum annually, which the givers called a grant, but which was invariably accepted by the recipients as tribute.[275] However it may have been at the beginning, the grant soon became tribute, for after some years the existence of Ragusa depended upon purchasing the benevolence of the Ottoman sultans. As the helplessness of the Ragusans increased, the tribute became larger. If we except the convention between the Genoese and Orkhan, of whose provisions and character we know nothing, the Ragusan commercial treaty is the first of the long series of treaties by which European cities and nations purchased the right to trade in the Ottoman Empire and to sail the high seas. Since in most cases the Osmanlis pledged themselves to nothing except to refrain from robbing merchants or from preventing their trading, the gifts exacted were nothing less than blackmail. After the sea-power of the Osmanlis had been broken, the Barbary corsairs inherited the privileges of this system which had been started in so small a way by the Ragusans.

Murad could not write. When the treaty with Ragusa was brought for his signature, he put his hand in the ink and made the impression of his fingers upon the paper. This is the origin of the _tughra_, which has ever since been the official signature of the house of Osman.[276]

VI

When Murad was settling himself in Adrianople, and laying plans for the conquest of Macedonia and Bulgaria, he was menaced by a new crusade. Despite its futile ending, or better, for that very reason, the expedition of Amadeo of Savoy in 1366 commands our attention. For it furnishes, as does the expedition of Admiral Boucicaut from Genoa in 1399, a striking illustration of how easily the growing Ottoman power might have been crushed by a resolute body of crusaders with a single aim, and of how impossible it was to secure that oneness of purpose, owing to the ingrained animosity of the East and West, of the Greek and Catholic Churches.

In 1361, when Lorenzo Celsi was elevated to the dogeship of Venice, the Senate had made overtures to John Palaeologos for an alliance against Murad.[277] This plan was frustrated by the successes of the Osmanlis in Thrace. The Venetians held back, and allowed John to suffer the humiliation of signing the treaty that made him a vassal of Murad. In the crusade that ended in the disaster of the Maritza, the Venetian participation was half-hearted, and it proved valueless. The Venetians were not even on hand to prevent Murad from crossing the Dardanelles. In fact, there is every reason to believe that they now began to look upon the Osmanlis as a valuable tool in checkmating the ambition of Louis of Hungary to inherit the shortlived empire of Stephen Dushan.[278]

When he saw that Murad had come into Thrace to stay, and that there was no hope from the Venetians, John Palaeologos turned to the Hungarians. He made a secret visit to Buda to enlist the aid of Louis, and made the usual promise that the Byzantines would return to the Roman fold.[279] On his return he passed through the principality of Sisman, who had just inherited the lower portion of Bulgaria. Sisman, either at the suggestion of Andronicus Palaeologos, who wanted to succeed his father, or in the hope of winning favour with Murad, detained the emperor in the fortress of Nicopolis on the Danube.[280]

Amadeo VI of Savoy was one of the princes who had taken the cross from Pope Urban V at Avignon on Holy Friday, 1363, for the crusade that never materialized. The receipt of a letter from Louis of Hungary, informing him of the imprisonment of his cousin (John’s mother was a princess of Savoy), and pointing out the rapid spread of Ottoman power, caused Amadeo to yield to the Pope’s continued and urgent solicitations.[281] With some fifteen hundred soldiers, he embarked for the East on fifteen galleys. After a stop at Negropont and Mitylene to get reinforcements, Amadeo entered the Hellespont, and captured Gallipoli without difficulty. The Osmanlis fled by night, abandoning the fortress.[282]

But the Savoyards made no attempt to follow up this victory, or even to keep Gallipoli. Instead of attacking the infidels, they sailed into the Black Sea, and started a vigorous campaign against the Bulgarians. Sozopolis and Burgas were captured, and several other important fortresses to the north. The bravery of the crusaders was rivalled only by their cruelty. Their bloodlust made such an impression upon the Bulgarians that they wanted nothing to do with Franks bearing the cross. When the Savoyards laid siege to Varna, Sisman gave up his prisoner to save the city.

John Palaeologos was borne back triumphantly to Constantinople. But friction soon arose. When Amadeo urged upon his kinsman the necessity of paying the price of his rescue and of the continued support of the crusaders by fulfilling his promise to return to the Roman Church, he met with stubborn refusal on the part of emperor and patriarch alike. In wild rage, Amadeo withdrew to Pera, and began to fight the Greeks by sea and land. The Constantinopolitans were so frightened that ‘they did not dare to show their head out of doors’. Pressed on all sides by Osmanli and Bulgarian, as well as by his deliverers, the wretched John saw no other way out than to promise openly to abjure his errors and swear allegiance to the Pope.

Having wrung this promise from those whom he had come to defend, Amadeo sailed away to Rome, where he reported to the Pope in full consistory ‘how at his request the emperor of Constantinople and his people desired to submit to the obedience and belief of the Holy Roman Church in hope that the Church would aid them against the infidels who were too strongly oppressing them’.

Urban and the cardinals listened without great interest to the Count of Savoy’s recital of his success in preparing the ground for a reunion of the churches. The story was getting to be an old one. John’s overture was received with suspicion. Urban had got the same promise in the spring of 1366 in a letter from Louis, which reported the interview John had sought at Buda.[283] To the envoy of Louis, who had arrived in Avignon just as Urban was starting for Rome, the Pope gave a letter commanding the King of Hungary to put off his crusade until the union of the churches was actually accomplished.[284]

VII

What lay behind the eagerness of Urban, at the beginning of his reign, to revive the crusades? Was he burning with holy zeal to recover the sepulchre of Christ from the hands of the Moslems? Was his heart set on protecting Cyprus and Rhodes? Had he determined to leave no stone unturned to protect the Byzantines and other eastern Christians from the encroachment and persecution of Murad? His letters indicate that his chief interest was the recovery of the lost power and glory of the papacy. There is the same revelation in the letters of his immediate successor, Gregory XI. These two popes had no catholic vision. They tried to keep their position as arbiters between France and England and Spain at Avignon, and at the same time to inherit the temporal power of the decaying Holy Roman Empire by circumventing the Visconti of Milan. The great schism in the Western Church, which so aided Murad and Bayezid in laying solidly the foundations of an empire in Europe, was the outcome of the short-sighted and purely selfish policy of these two popes. How far from the truth it is to represent them as courageously, whole-heartedly, and persistently endeavouring to awaken the interest and attention of Europe in the peril from the East!

The fall of Adrianople and of Philippopolis should have been a warning to Urban. He read in it, however, not a glorious opportunity to demonstrate the solidarity of Christendom by driving the Moslems out of Europe and rescuing fellow Christians from apostasy, slavery, and death, but an occasion to force the schismatic Greeks to return to the Roman communion. Of the popes of the fourteenth century, Urban had the greatest chance to prove himself a worthy champion of Christ and civilization. For it was during his reign that the Osmanlis began their conquests and their proselytizing in Europe. At the beginning they could easily have been checked. But it never occurred to Urban that there was a common interest of Christendom higher than and outside of the Roman Church.

The fault lay not wholly with Urban and with Gregory. They reflected the spirit of their age. But it does no credit to their personal character nor to the high position which they held to say that they were the victims, rather than the masters, of the prevailing bigotry and ignorance of their generation. In the fourteenth century, the West had already begun to try to impose its commerce, its customs, its laws, and its religion upon the East. There was not, nor has there ever been since, a sympathetic ‘give and take’ between Occident and Orient. In a mint, if the coin when stamped does not correspond exactly to the mould, it is rejected. Similarly the West, when it tries to put every eastern people through its mould and finds no exact correspondence, rejects. Hence, on the one side, the scorn of the ‘I am better than thou’: on the other side, a hatred born not only of fear and of conviction of inferiority, but of a sense of injustice which is none the less vital from a knowledge that the wrong is not, and will not be, righted.

Amadeo of Savoy, uncivilized, fanatical through ignorance, the fertile breeding-ground of fanaticism, true and unchanged descendant of the Fourth Crusaders, was a prophetic figure at Constantinople in 1366. He represented the only possible type of deliverer for Byzantium. But deliverance on his terms the Greeks would not accept. Death or Islam were preferable. And who can blame them? Two years before Amadeo’s expedition, the Greeks of Crete had risen in rebellion against their Venetian overlords because an attempt had been made to impose upon them the Latin faith and rites.[285] When they were hunted down and massacred for refusing to worship after the western fashion, not only Pope Urban, but also Petrarch, wrote to the Doge congratulating him upon his valiant and successful efforts to save the Church of Christ in Crete![286]

In a letter to Pope Urban, Petrarch spoke with approval of the policy of using the Ottoman menace to stamp out the Eastern heresy. ‘The Osmanlis are merely enemies,’ he wrote, ‘but the schismatic Greeks are worse than enemies. The Osmanlis hate us less, for they fear us less. The Greeks, however, both fear and hate us with all their soul.’[287] These words of Petrarch epitomize the feeling between the Eastern and Western Churches during his own day, and, if what one can see with his own eyes in Jerusalem and elsewhere is a fair example, up to the twentieth century.[288]

If the European nations regarded the adherents of the Orthodox Church (the term Greek in its religious sense must be taken to include all the Balkan races) as ‘worse than enemies’, that is, than the Osmanlis, it is equally true that the Osmanlis found from 1350 to 1500 that the hatred of the Balkan races for the Latin Church was their most potent ally, not only in the actual conquest, but in reconciling the conquered to their fate. One does not want to detract from the genius of the early Ottoman sovereigns and from the reputation for superb fighting ability so honestly won by the Ottoman armies. But it must not be forgotten that each separate race in the Balkans preferred the rule of the Osmanlis to that of their neighbours, and that the one point in which the Balkan races were of the same mind was that Ottoman domination was preferable to that of the Hungarians and the Italians. For every crusade was a scheme for religious propaganda and territorial aggrandizement, in just the same spirit as in modern times the nations of Europe have exploited the misery of Ottoman Christians for the purpose of securing concessions.

In spite of the fact that John Palaeologos was informed by the Patriarch Philotheus that a mixed council of clergy and government officials, presided over by the empress, had been held in June 1376, and had decided against the reunion of the churches,[289] John persisted in his negotiations with the Pope. Urban did all that he could to facilitate the visit of the Byzantine emperor to Rome.[290] But at the same time he was writing to the Venetians and to the Dalmatian cities to protect the Catholics of Cattaro against the Serbian and Albanian heretics,[291] and was encouraging Louis in his suicidal campaign against the Bulgarians.

In 1369, John Palaeologos left the government of Constantinople to his elder son Andronicus, and set out for Rome, where, on October eighteenth, he made his profession of faith in the presence of four cardinals, and confirmed it by a golden bull. The next morning, at St. Peter’s, he formally abjured the errors of the Orthodox Church before the high altar, with his hands in those of the Pope.[292] The Pope accepted him as a ‘son of the Church’, promised that he should be relieved of the Turk, and gave him letters earnestly recommending his cause to the princes of Christendom.[293]

Urban V was quick to use the prestige which he believed the adhesion of John Palaeologos had given him. He announced broadcast the happy consummation of his efforts, stating that the Byzantine emperor had done homage to the Vicar of Christ in St. Peter’s.[294] But letters sent during the same winter to the Greek clergy, urging them to accept the action of their emperor,[295] and other letters from his secret correspondence of this year, indicate how little faith he had in the Emperor’s sincerity or ability to fulfil his promises. Was the abjuration in St. Peter’s a farce, in which Emperor and Pope allowed themselves to trifle with holy things, each for the sake of his immediate advantage?

John had hoped that his adhesion to the Roman Church would bring to him grants of money, ships, and men from the Latin princes, and that an army would rally around him to fight the Osmanlis. But not only did he return from France ‘with empty hands’, but he was detained at Venice because of debts owing to merchants. In vain he begged Andronicus to send the money for his release. The son who had four years before been charged with being party to his father’s imprisonment in Bulgaria was no more filial at this humiliating crisis. He answered that there was no money in the treasury, and that he could get nothing from the clergy. But his younger son, Manuel, brought from Salonika the ransom.[296]

John Palaeologos returned to his capital poorer than when he left. He brought no help from Europe, and he had bound himself publicly by oath to an obligation which he had known he could not fulfil. He had broken faith with Murad, who during these years had been growing more and more powerful. There was nothing for him to do but to make himself tributary to Murad in order that he might enjoy ‘up to the end of his life’ his last possessions in peace.[297] Three years later, in 1373, when his ambassador John Lascaris failed in a second attempt to get aid from the Western princes,[298] the Byzantine emperor recognized Murad as his suzerain, promised to do military service in person in Murad’s army, and gave to him his son Manuel as hostage.[299]

Urban died a few months after John’s visit to Rome. Gregory XI, who succeeded him in December 1370, had little hope of carrying on further negotiations with the Eastern Church; for the Greek ecclesiastics were stubborn in their determination to maintain the absolute independence of the patriarchate. The Genoese and Venetians were fighting bitterly in Cyprus. In 1371, Gregory made a strong appeal to France, England, Venice, and Flanders to co-operate with Genoa in saving the last Christians of the Holy Land.[300] There was no response.

That Gregory realized clearly the peril to Christendom in the advance of Murad’s armies is shown in two remarkable letters written to Louis of Hungary in May and November 1372. His words were prophetic. He urged Louis to resist the Osmanlis before they advanced farther into Europe. They had already entered Serbia. He trembled to think what would happen if they pushed through Albania and secured a port on the Adriatic. Unless Louis entered without delay into an alliance with his Christian neighbours, how could he protect his own kingdom and all Christendom from the Mohammedan peril.[301] Seconding this warning to the King of Hungary, the Pope commanded the Hungarian and Slavic archbishops to preach the crusade in Hungary, Poland, and the Dalmatian cities. Everywhere special boxes were placed in the churches for collecting funds. A tithe was levied on the monasteries and abbeys of Hungary and Dalmatia. Louis, with five of his most powerful nobles, took the cross, and swore to the Pope that he would put an army in the field within a year.[302] Louis asked Venice for triremes, but when the Venetians found that he intended them to be a donation for ‘the common cause’, they found that they could not build them.[303] Padua declined an invitation to guarantee the cost of construction. The Hungarians did not fulfil their promises. In fact, there is no evidence that they made any effort to acquit themselves of their oath.

When John Palaeologos made a last desperate appeal to the Pope, before he entered into his third and final compact with Murad, Gregory, in receiving the imperial envoy, burst into tears, and promised that he would save Constantinople, if only the Byzantine emperor would cause his people to renounce their heresies and return to the Roman Church. In 1375, he wrote once more to Louis to inform him that Constantinople was in danger of capture from Murad.[304] Letters in the same year to Edward of England pictured the Ottoman advance and the peril of Christendom, urged a general war against the Osmanlis, and asked for a subsidy to provide galleys ‘to prevent the crossing into Europe of more Turks, because Constantinople is in imminent danger’.[305] The letters of Gregory XI to the Christian princes prove conclusively that the full import of Murad’s early successes was understood by the Pope and was impressed upon both secular and ecclesiastical authorities throughout Europe.

But both John and Gregory lost heart. Neither was able to fulfil the compact made in Rome. Gregory could not unite Christendom to relieve the Byzantines. John could not persuade the Byzantines to renounce, as he had done, the ‘Greek heresies’. So, as we have seen, he became Murad’s vassal.[306] The Pope, involved in the quarrel of Emperor Charles IV and the Duke of Bavaria with the Marquis of Brandenburg, and anxious over the outcome, for the papacy, of the continual unrest in the Italian cities, returned from Avignon to Rome in 1378. He died a few months later.[307] The struggle arising from the election of Gregory’s successor gave birth to the ‘Great Schism’. This left Murad a free hand in subjugating the Balkan peninsula.

VIII

The sources of information for the movements from the outside for the relief of the Balkan Christians, and for the religious and political quarrels of the Byzantines, are so numerous and so detailed that one is embarrassed by too much material. Many interesting facts cannot even be mentioned. But when we come to the beginning of the Ottoman conquest in Europe under Murad and Bayezid, we find ourselves in the midst of what an eminent Slavic historian has called ‘the most obscure and difficult period of South-Slavic history’.[308] The chroniclers, whether they be Slavic, Rumanian, or Ottoman, are so contradictory and so lacking in explicit statement that we cannot speak with certainty of the sequence of events. The Byzantine chroniclers, verbose to the point of weariness in detailing petty and trifling quarrels and happenings, are almost silent concerning the momentous events that marked the ruin of their empire. It is difficult to unravel the twisted skeins, and find a thread to carry the story of the conquest from 1366 to 1389. When it is impossible to choose between contradictory records, the geography of the field of action, with which one can gain a first-hand knowledge, must be the final factor in determining the sequence of conquest between the adoption of Adrianople by Murad as his capital and the downfall of the Serbians at Kossova.

The occupation of Adrianople and Philippopolis was as severe a blow to the Bulgarians as to the Byzantines. In spite of the fact, however, that Greek and Bulgarian had a common interest in driving the Osmanli from Thrace, or at the very least in checking his advance, there was no move made at this time for an alliance. On the contrary, even when the Osmanlis were engaged in the Thracian campaign, war arose between John V and Alexander. The Byzantines captured Anchiale, and tried desperately to take Mesembria by assault.[309] The Greek patriarch wrote to Czar Alexander, reminding him of the sacredness of harmony and the necessity of accord at that critical moment, but the letter was not backed by the good faith and good will of the Byzantine emperor. Neither John nor Alexander attempted to give assistance to the Serbian and Hungarian crusade that ended so disastrously on the banks of the Maritza.

The conquest of Bulgaria up to the main Balkan range imposed itself upon Murad as a corollary to the Ottoman dominion in Thrace, and the undisturbed possession of Adrianople and Philippopolis. For the Bulgarians, through centuries of varying fortunes, had grown accustomed to fighting for the right to live in Thrace. Often had they been beaten back to the Balkans, and as often pressed forward again to the Ergene. To win and lose Adrianople and other Thracian cities was old history with them. They always came back. Between 1362 and 1365, Murad had experience with Bulgarian persistence and tenacity of purpose. They were masters again of Kirk Kilisse, Midia, Bunar Hissar, and Viza when Murad made his change of capital from Brusa to Adrianople. Yamboli had been strongly fortified by Alexander. Bulgaria seemed as formidable and as forbidding to Murad’s dream of empire as the emirates of Asia Minor.

Fortune again favoured the Osmanlis. Czar Alexander died in 1365,[310] leaving three heirs. To John Sisman fell middle and southern Bulgaria from the Danube to the Rhodope Mountains and the Bulgarian pretensions in Thrace. Old Tirnovo was his capital. Stracimir inherited western Bulgaria, with Widin for capital, and the Bulgarian pretensions to the valley of the Vardar and western Macedonia. (The Bulgarian remnant of eastern Macedonia was in the hands of an independent Bulgarian prince, Constantine, whose stronghold was Kustendil.) Dobrotich became master of the Dobrudja and the upper Black Sea coast, where Bulgarian, Cuman and Alan lived together with hardly any distinguishing characteristics.

The division of Bulgaria, at the moment when union was essential, proved fatal. The sons of Alexander never joined to face the common danger. So marked was the division of Alexander’s kingdom that thirty years after the conquest the conquered territories were known as ‘the three Bulgarias’.[311]

Stracimir, jealous because Sisman seemed to have received the lion’s share of Alexander’s inheritance, did not hesitate to make overtures to Murad, offering to co-operate with the Osmanlis against his brother and to share the portion of Sisman with them.[312] Before any agreement could be made, however, Stracimir found himself face to face with a terrible danger in the west, which soon caused him to forget both Sisman and Murad. Louis of Hungary had interpreted his crusader’s commission as an authorization to ‘make war against the heretics’. It was a pretext to get possession of Widin, which was essential to his ambitious project of adding Serbia to his kingdom. He attacked the Bulgarians on the ground that they were enemies of the Church and must be forced to acknowledge the supremacy of Rome. Widin was captured and Stracimir imprisoned.[313] Stracimir’s dominions were flooded with Franciscan missionaries, who were backed by a brutal soldiery in their proselytizing efforts.[314] Two hundred thousand Bulgarians abjured the orthodox heresy, and were re-baptized in the Latin rite. This forcible conversion, which was purely a political matter, was as objectionable to the Bulgarians as to the Cretans. They hated ‘with a perfect hatred’ the Franciscans whom Pope Urban had sent, and the cause for which they stood.

At the first opportunity, the Bulgarians of the west called in Sisman and Vadislav of Wallachia. The Hungarians were driven out of Widin and the Franciscans in the city massacred.[315] Louis was powerful enough to wreak terrible vengeance. In 1370, Widin fell once more into his hands. The Bulgarians of the western Balkans were subjected to such a relentless persecution that they welcomed the Moslem conquest to secure freedom of worship. Urban had incited Louis to this war, and had congratulated him upon his laudable zeal in converting the heretics.[316]

We have already spoken of the punishment that came to Sisman as a result of the detention of John Palaeologos. The Italian crusaders on the Black Sea coast were as powerful an aid to Murad’s empire-building as were the Hungarian crusaders on the western frontier. The successors of Louis reaped the bitter fruits of his insane policy. Louis and Amadeo of Savoy contributed in no little measure to make possible the conquests of Murad. When Amadeo withdrew from Bulgaria, he left the cities he had captured to the Greeks. Sisman was compelled to expend his energy in recapturing them. But Murad had already anticipated him in the important fortress of Sozopolis, which commanded the entrance to the port of Burgas.[317]

Shortly after the Ottoman occupation of Sozopolis, the Bulgarians were everywhere dispossessed in Thrace, and the capture of Yamboli[318] forced Sisman to follow the example of John Palaeologos. He became a vassal of Murad. His sister Mara entered Murad’s harem, but with the stipulation that she be allowed to retain her Christian faith.

Murad gladly gave his new ally and brother-in-law a strong Ottoman army to co-operate in the attack upon the Hungarians. The Osmanlis helped in driving Louis out of Widin. Sisman, like Cantacuzenos, first guided the Osmanlis through the heart of his country. It was under the leadership of Sisman that they saw the Danube, their river of destiny. When Sisman, even with the help of the Osmanlis and Wallachians, could not gain possession of Stracimir’s inheritance, he returned to Tirnovo. There he learned that Lalashahin was planning an expedition westward, which seemed to be intended against Sofia.

Sisman now realized that his position was critical and that the fate of Bulgaria was at stake. In the early spring of 1371, he hurried into the Rilo Mountains and sent out an appeal to the Serbian kral who was at that time ruling in eastern Macedonia. Then he went to the relief of Ishtiman, which was already menaced by the Osmanlis. Failing in this effort, Sisman fell back to Samakov, where he was joined by the Serbians. Lalashahin led his army from Ishtiman into the valley of the Isker. The two krals joined battle with him in the plain of Samakov. The Ottoman victory was decisive.[319] The Serbians and Bulgarians fled into the recesses of Musalla, the highest mountain in the Balkan peninsula, and of Popova Shapka. Sisman disappeared after the battle.[320] The way to Sofia was open. All Bulgaria lay at the feet of the conqueror. It is from the battle of Samakov that we must date the destruction of an independent Bulgaria.

But Murad was not yet ready to follow up this decisive victory. The only immediate result of the battle of Samakov was the submission of Constantine, Bulgarian prince of Kustendil, in the upper valley of the Struma. After the fall of Samakov, his position was untenable. Constantine hurried to Murad’s camp, and did homage to the conqueror. Murad gave back to him as vassal his principality.[321] With the wisdom that marked every successive step of his progress in Europe, Murad refrained from advancing beyond Samakov. He ordered Lalashahin to lead the army into Macedonia, and to join Evrenos in the advance towards the Vardar.

IX

The dramatic death of Stephen Dushan, in 1355, just as he was starting upon the expedition against Constantinople for which his whole life had been a preparation, is recorded in the previous chapter. Stephen’s son was so unfit to inherit the aspirations and carry on the work of his father that he was called in derision by his people Nejaki, the weakling.[322] The nobles and generals of Stephen Nejaki ignored him. Each man seized what territory he could hold and defend against his neighbour. There was anarchy in Macedonia and Serbia. The dissolution of Stephen Dushan’s conquests resulted in a bloody and destructive civil war between cities and factions.[323] The dowager Czarina managed to preserve a semblance of prestige, if not of authority, at Serres. But the ‘empire’ was no more. As local rulers, Serbians stayed in the principal cities of Macedonia. There was undoubtedly a Serbian element in the village population. Many villagers, however, who acknowledged the overlordship of Stephen’s warriors and other Serbian nobles, did not know then, _any more than they know now_, to what race they themselves belonged. This has always been the Macedonian problem.

The defeat of the crusaders on the banks of the Maritza in 1363 had been a defensive battle on the part of the Osmanlis. There was no attempt to invade Macedonia. While Murad was occupied in the subjugation of Thrace and of southern Bulgaria, several efforts were made by the Byzantines to come to an understanding with the Serbians. In 1364, the patriarch Callixtus went to Serres to see Stephen’s widow, who had retired to a convent. His purpose was to form an alliance. Soon after reaching Serres, Callixtus succumbed to the hardships of the journey.[324] His effort came to nothing. That Stephen’s son still held to the pretensions of his father and had no intention of treating with the Byzantines, is demonstrated by a bull, dated from Pristina in 1365, in which he calls himself ‘emperor of the Servians and of the Greeks’.[325]

Stephen Urosh, the ‘weakling’, died in 1367.[326] Uglesa, who usurped the kralship of Serres and shared the ‘empire’ of Stephen Dushan with his brothers and fellow adventurers, Vukasin and Goiko,[327] sent an embassy to the patriarch Philotheos declaring that he would annul the bull of 1352, by which Dushan had created an autocephalous Serbian Church,[328] and would cause all the Serbians to return to the Orthodox allegiance.[329] After three years of negotiation, precious time wasted with trifling formalities, the reconciliation and union of the Serbian and Greek Churches was effected.[330] But, if we are to believe the authorities of Orbini, Uglesa, while he was negotiating with the Greeks of Constantinople, had levied tribute upon the Greeks of Salonika, and would have made himself master of Salonika, had not his untimely death prevented the consummation of the great Serbian dream.[331]

At the time of the reconciliation with the Orthodox Church, Uglesa had completed a plan of united action with his two brothers to oppose the Ottoman invasion of Macedonia.[332] Uglesa had been informed that a great army was gathered in Adrianople, which awaited the return of Murad from Bulgaria to commence its march. Four weeks after the negotiations with the Byzantines had been successfully concluded, in the early summer of 1371, the Serbian army reached the Maritza at Cernomen,[333] between Adrianople and Svilen.[334] This battle has been confused with the earlier battle of 1363, and it is impossible to separate the accounts of the two actions.[335] The Osmanlis were again victorious. Uglesa and Goiko were drowned in the Maritza. Vukasin escaped from the field of battle only to be killed by his servant for the gold chain he wore around his neck.[336]

The battle of Cernomen lost Macedonia to the Serbians. The three princes were killed. Most of the Serbian adventurers who had been the companions of Stephen Dushan, and who had profited by his Macedonian conquests, disappeared. The Osmanlis had no opposition in penetrating to the valley of the Vardar.

The monk Isaias of Serres has left a graphic contemporary picture of the Ottoman invasion of Macedonia. ‘Like the birds of Heaven, the Ishmaelites spread themselves over the land, and never ceased murdering the inhabitants or carrying them off into slavery. The country was empty of men, of cattle, and of the fruits of the fields. There was no prince or leader: there was no redeemer or saviour among the people. All faded away before the fear of the Ishmaelites, and even the brave hearts of heroic men were transformed into weak hearts of women. Rightly were the dead envied by the living.’[337]

The invasion of Macedonia in 1371-2 was as rapid and decisive a campaign as the invasion of Thrace had been ten years before. Kavalla, Drama and Serres were occupied by Khaïreddin and Evrenos.[338] Drama and Serres were colonized, their churches converted into mosques, and they soon became the residence of the owners of the timarets granted in eastern Macedonia. These two cities have always been the strongholds of the Mohammedan element in Macedonia, and the residence of the great Moslem landowners. The cities and villages in the valleys of the Mesta and the Struma acknowledged Murad as sovereign, and submitted without resistance to Ottoman laws and Ottoman taxation.[339] Where-ever it was safe to do so, Murad seized the lands, and appointed Ottoman governors. In districts where pacification would have proved a difficult task, he allowed Serbian chiefs to rule as his vassals.

With the same impetuosity that had carried them to the foothills of the Rhodope Mountains after the capture of Adrianople, the Osmanlis crossed the Vardar in 1372, and pushed their arms into Old Serbia, Albania, Bosnia, and even to the mountains of Dalmatia, from which they could see the Adriatic.[340] Other adventurous bands, eager to attract the attention, the commendation, and the rewards of Murad, followed the footsteps of the Catalans, traversed Thessaly, and appeared in the plains of Attica.[341]

Murad destroyed the Macedonian empire of Stephen Dushan without great effort. The Serbians remaining east of the Vardar, nobles and peasants, became Ottoman subjects. In upper Serbia, they rallied round one of their number, Lazar Gresljanovitch, whom they formally elected as successor of the Serbian kings. But Lazar was so weak that he did not take the title of emperor (_tzar_) or of king (_kral_), but called himself merely prince (_knez_).[342] To secure the existence of his kingdom or principality, he sought peace with Murad, and, following the example of the Byzantine and Bulgarian rulers, became vassal and tributary of the Ottoman emir.[343]

X

Before the end of the year 1372, it was recognized that the Osmanlis had come into the Balkans to stay. The conquest of Macedonia east of the Vardar, following so closely upon the subjugation of southern Bulgaria and the completion of the Thracian conquest, gave to Murad a preponderant position in the Balkan peninsula. The Byzantine emperor and the Bulgarian and Serbian princes were his tributaries. Wallachia, Bosnia, Albania, Epirus, Thessaly, Attica and the Peloponnesus were now on the confines of the Ottoman Empire, and menaced by Ottoman invasion.

In Europe, Murad was credited with having the intention of invading Hungary. It was reported that he had made an alliance with the Tartars of Russia to attack Hungary. The Tartars were to cross the Carpathians by way of Moldavia into Transylvania, while Murad was to work his way up the valley of the Danube.[344] Murad may have dreamed of such a project, just as he had thought of making a supreme effort to enter Constantinople after his first Thracian campaign. But, if he did, he was deterred by the same well-grounded fear of moving too fast. Ten years before he had refrained from committing a fatal error. He would continue to make haste slowly. The early Osmanlis were not raiders. They were empire-builders. They succeeded because they never forgot that their greatest problem was that of assimilation. When they extended their conquests beyond the area of possible assimilation, the period of decay automatically commenced.

The decade following the Macedonian campaign of 1371-2 was spent in ottomanizing southern Bulgaria and eastern Macedonia, in completing the assimilation of Thrace, in reorganizing the army, and in a rearrangement of the system of distributing the timarets or military fiefs. Royal domains were created, and lands were set aside for the support of the mosques and other religious institutions in the form of inalienable endowments (_vakufs_).

The only move of Murad against the Hungarians was to send five thousand archers, upon the request of the Senate, to help the Venetians in their war against Louis.[345]

After the Macedonian campaign, Murad turned his attention once more to Byzantium. John, when he returned from his unsuccessful trip to Rome, placated Murad by sending his third son, Theodore, to serve in the Ottoman army. In 1373, John, passing over Andronicus, raised Manuel to the imperial purple as co-emperor. The disloyalty of his eldest son in the question of the emperor’s ransom from his Venetian creditors made it natural that John should have selected Manuel to rule with him.

John was not wrong in his estimate of the character of Andronicus. The disappointed prince entered into a conspiracy with Saoudji, son of Murad, who had been entrusted with the command of the Thracian army while his father was occupied in Anatolia. John and Manuel, according to some accounts, were also in the field with Murad. So the moment was propitious. The two sons raised the standard of revolt against their fathers.[346] Murad, who hated his own son and feared him, crossed immediately into Thrace. The army which was supporting the cause of the young princes abandoned them, and the rebels fled to shut themselves up in Demotika.[347]

Faced with starvation, the inhabitants of Demotika opened the gates of their city to Murad. He exacted a most atrocious vengeance. The garrison were bound hand and foot and thrown into the river. The young Osmanlis and Greeks who had been led astray by the princes, were put to death. Wherever possible Murad compelled fathers to act as executioners of their sons. He set the example by tearing out Saoudji’s eyes, and then cutting off his head.[348]

It has been generally written that Murad intended that the same punishment should be meted out to Andronicus. For the sake of appearances, he did order John Palaeologos to have his son’s eyes put out. But there was no order for execution. John Palaeologos consented to the blinding of Andronicus and of his grandson and namesake, who was only five years old.[349] The operation was not successfully performed. Both Andronicus and his son, even if temporarily blinded, recovered their eyesight. Some have explained this by stating that they were healed by a Genoese physician.[350] There is recorded a beautiful story that Andronicus owed the restoration of his sight to the empress, his mother, who visited him daily in the tower of Anemas and was prodigal in her efforts to heal him. He was in despair for some months, until one day he saw a lizard climbing on a wall.[351]

If Murad had really desired the death or total blindness of Andronicus, he could easily have secured this result. While punishing his own son, however, he saw to it that Andronicus escaped the consequences of the same crime. Here we have a revelation of the far-sightedness and cold-bloodedness of Murad. He killed his own son, because he feared his rivalry. He spared the son of John Palaeologos in order to perpetuate the rivalry between the emperor and his son. To have killed or incapacitated Andronicus would have been from his view-point an act of folly rather than of justice; for Andronicus, brilliant, adventurous, magnetic, was at the same time a worthy exemplar of the name he bore, a name that stood for the acme of unscrupulous conduct and contempt for ties of blood. Murad had only to wait, and history would repeat itself. Internal dissensions in the family of the Palaeologi had made the fortunes of Orkhan. Murad had no intention of getting rid of Andronicus, in whom he saw the means of still further enmeshing the Byzantine emperors.[352]

The Byzantine historians record for the year 1374 another event, which illustrates the power of Murad over John Palaeologos. Manuel, who had resumed the government of Salonika, tried to induce the inhabitants of Serres to recover their liberty by massacring the Ottoman garrison and the Ottoman colonists. Serres, in spite of its prominent place in recent Serbian history, was regarded by the Byzantines (as it still is by the Greeks of to-day) as a city of their compatriots. We have no means of establishing the grounds upon which Manuel believed it possible to restore the Byzantine authority in the country between the Struma and the Vardar. The sequel indicates that it was a wild and unfounded hope of a desperate man, and shows how thoroughly in two years the Osmanlis had become masters of the situation in Macedonia.

Murad, warned in time of the project, sent Khaïreddin pasha with a large army to Serres. The Greeks implicated in the plot were promptly executed, and Khaïreddin moved against Salonika. At the approach of the army, Manuel fled by sea to Constantinople. John Palaeologos was so frightened that he did not dare to receive in the imperial city the beloved son whom he had raised to the dignity of co-emperorship. Manuel then went to Lesbos, whose Genoese lord was his uncle by marriage. But the fear of Murad had reached the Aegaean Sea. The fugitive was turned away. Staking all upon the issue, Manuel went to Brusa and threw himself at Murad’s feet. The time was not yet ripe to destroy the Palaeologi. Murad pardoned Manuel, and sent him back to Constantinople. It was only after Manuel had presented a letter from Murad, confirming the fact that forgiveness had been granted, that the emperor of Byzantium dared to receive his son and heir within the walls of Constantinople.[353]

Pressed by the Venetians, John made in 1375 the mistake of giving them, in exchange for three thousand ducats and the jewels which had been pledged for his debts after the visit to Rome, the island of Tenedos.[354] The strategic importance of Tenedos was so vital that the Genoese could not allow this island to fall into the hands of their rivals. It is an axiom as old as history that who holds Tenedos controls the entrance and exit to the Dardanelles. Until the Black Sea dries up and the wheat-fields of Russia fail to yield, there will be a ‘question of the Straits’.

The news of this grant to Venice meant but one thing to the Genoese. There was feverish activity at Genoa. A fleet was manned, ostensibly for the purpose of maintaining the Levant colonies against the Turks.[355] Pope Gregory XI allowed the archbishop of Genoa to raise enormous sums by questionable means for equipping and increasing the fleet.[356] Instead of using this fleet to free the Aegaean and the Black Sea from the ever-increasing Turkish pirates, or to attack the Osmanlis, the Genoese admiral sailed to Constantinople. Aided by the Genoese of Galata and by Bayezid, Andronicus had escaped from the tower of Anemas. When the fleet arrived from Genoa, he gave to its admiral a golden bull, awarding Tenedos to Genoa.[357] To Murad he offered his sister in exchange for help.[358] The old story was repeated. After a month’s siege, Andronicus, by the aid of his Ottoman and Genoese supporters, entered Constantinople. His father and his two brothers, Manuel and Theodore, were imprisoned in the Tower of Anemas, where he and his son had been shut up for two years.[359] The foresight of Murad in regard to Andronicus was justified.

While Andronicus was besieging Constantinople, John V managed to send word to the inhabitants of Tenedos to resist the Genoese and give themselves to the Venetians. If this were not possible, they were to abandon the island to the Turks rather than allow the Genoese to occupy it.[360]

After a year’s imprisonment, the emperor, through the wife of his jailer, succeeded in perfecting with Venetians residing in Constantinople a plan of escape. But its execution was deferred when John discovered that his sons, who were confined to separate rooms, could not be included in the rescue. Later, the efforts of the Venetians were renewed upon the solemn promise that Tenedos should revert to Venice. The plot was discovered. The Venetians, availing themselves of the lucky chance that a Venetian fleet had just arrived in the Golden Horn from the Black Sea, fled from Constantinople, abandoning John Palaeologos to his fate.[361] Andronicus IV was solemnly crowned in St. Sophia sole emperor of Byzantium.

After two more years of imprisonment,[362] John and his sons succeeded in escaping in June 1379. They got across the Bosphorus, and took refuge with Bayezid, who was again watching the course of events at Scutari. Murad, still playing the game of pitting father against son, drove a hard bargain. Andronicus must be pardoned once more, and given the government of several cities, probably including Salonika.[363] John and Manuel, as a price for freedom and restoration to the imperial throne, agreed to pay an annual tribute of thirty thousand pieces of gold, furnish a contingent of twelve thousand soldiers to the Ottoman army, and surrender to the Osmanlis Philadelphia, the last Byzantine possession in Asia.[364] When the Philadelphians refused to assent to this shameful transaction, John and Manuel joined the Ottoman army and fought against their last Christian subjects in Asia to force upon them the Moslem yoke.[365]

Thus did Murad hold to the lips of John Palaeologos the cup of humiliation, nay, more, of degradation, until he drained the last bitter dregs. We do not need to pass judgement upon John and Manuel. It is sufficient to say that they drank and did not die!

The question of Tenedos brought Venice and Genoa into their most bitter conflict of the century. The Visconti of Milan were allied to the Venetians, while the Hungarians attacked them by land.[366] After initial successes, the great Venetian admiral Pisani was beaten decisively in 1379. The Genoese captured Chioggia, and held Venice at bay in her own lagoons. It was the timely arrival of Charles Zeno and the fleet from the Levant that saved the Adriatic republic.[367] In 1381, peace was made through the intermediary of Count Amadeo of Savoy, on condition that the Senate surrendered Tenedos to Amadeo, who guaranteed to demolish the fortress within two years. It was also a stipulation of the treaty of Turin that Andronicus IV be recognized as heir to John V.[368] Did the influence of Murad reach as far as the peace negotiations in the capital of far-off Savoy? The Count of Savoy fulfilled his promise. In 1383, the fortifications of Tenedos were rased, and the inhabitants of the island removed to Crete and Negropont.[369]

The war over Tenedos had kept open the Straits, but it helped Murad in an inestimable degree to tighten the grip of the Osmanlis upon Thrace and Macedonia. The Italian republics thought no more of driving the Osmanlis out of Europe. From now on until they themselves see their possessions wrested from them and their commerce in the Levant ruined by the successors of Murad, the Venetians and Genoese are suitors for favours at the door of the tent of the Moslem conqueror.

XI

While the struggle between the Palaeologi and the Venetian war with Genoa and Hungary were strengthening Murad’s position in Europe, he began to turn his attention, for the first time since the expedition against Angora at the beginning of his reign, to the expansion of Ottoman authority in Asia Minor. The antipathy of the South Slavs for the Hungarians, the anarchy among the Serbians, the lack of leadership among the Bulgarians, and the civil strife in the Byzantine imperial family made the period from 1376 to 1381 peculiarly appropriate for initiating a movement against the emirates on the confines of his own state. Murad felt for the moment secure in Macedonia and Thrace. The inhabitants of the conquered countries could do nothing. There were no prospects of a crusade. Through the rapid increase of the Ottoman race during the first fifteen years in Europe, and through the vassalage of the Christian princes, which compelled them to furnish contingents for war, Murad now had money and soldiers to confront his nearer Anatolian rivals.

In 1360, after the capture of Angora and the defeat of the Galatian village chiefs,[370] Murad did not lose his head. He was wise enough to fear an attack on Kermian. Now he had only to threaten, thanks to the prestige and actual power he had gained in Europe. The emir of Kermian was too prudent to risk a war with the son of the rival whom he had despised. In order to preserve his independence and at the same time his pride, he agreed to give his daughter in marriage to Bayezid. The territories which Murad coveted, and was ready to try to take by force, went with her as her marriage portion. It was a munificent dot. The western and northern part of Kermian became Ottoman. The most important city in the new territory was Kutayia, the ancient Cotýaeum, a strategic point of great value. Its remarkable citadel of countless towers is still standing.

The marriage of the emir of Kermian’s daughter to Bayezid was celebrated at Brusa with much splendour. For the first time we hear of the Osmanlis interested in matters of court and luxury. The simple warriors, who had known nothing but the village council and the camp fire, were becoming accustomed to the more formal and more complex life of the Greek cities. With every victory and every extension of sovereignty, with every addition to the army and to the body of civilian officials, the distance between the sovereign and his people was widened. The ceremonial evolved by the Ottoman court was that of Byzantium; the customs of the higher classes, who were just beginning to realize their self-made rank, were Byzantine, even to the veiling of women.[371] The Osmanlis had not yet come into touch with the Arabs or Egyptians. If they received anything from the Persians, it was by way of Constantinople.

The Ottoman occupation of Kutayia was a grave blow to the security of the emirates of Tekke and Hamid. The emir of Hamid saw the hopelessness of a struggle. He compounded with his pride by ‘selling’ to Murad, in 1377, the territory between Tekke, Kermian, and Karamania. Several cities, including Sparta and Kara-Agatch, became Ottoman, but most important of all, Ak Sheïr, which brought the Osmanlis to the frontier of Karamania.

The purchase of this important territory extended the Ottoman state south to the border of Tekke. In 1378, Murad made his only conquest by arms from a rival emir in Asia. He invaded Tekke, and annexed the districts at the south and south-west of the lake region. But he did not cross the mountains to the Mediterranean, so the emir of Tekke still retained Adalia, and Alaya was undisturbed.

For three years Murad devoted his energies to the pacification and assimilation of these slices of Kermian, Hamid and Tekke. But none of the three principalities had been extinguished. And Sarukhan, Aïdin and Menteshe were untouched. There was still much to be accomplished in western Asia Minor. But Murad preferred to return to Adrianople. He would increase his power and prestige in Europe, recruit his armies in the Balkans, and then come once more into Anatolia.

XII

To assure to the Osmanlis their preponderant position in the Balkan peninsula, the possession of three cities was necessary. The capture of Sofia meant the extension of Ottoman sovereignty over Bulgaria to the Danube. Nish was the key to Serbia. Monastir was indispensable, if the Osmanlis intended to be more than raiders west of the Vardar.

In 1380, Murad ordered the advance to the Vardar. Istip was captured, and colonized in the same thorough way as had been done at Drama and Serres. A large army under Timurtash crossed the Vardar, took Monastir by assault through the marshes, and pushed north to Prilep.[372] Monastir and Prilep became frontier fortresses of the empire. The conquest of Macedonia was now complete. These cities were excellent bases of operation against the Albanians to the west and the Epirotes to the south-west.

During the reign of Murad, the Osmanlis did not attempt a subjugation of Albania and Epirus. They were, however, invited into these countries by native princes.

Thomas, despot of Janina, used Ottoman mercenaries against the Souliotes in 1382.[373] Two years later, after the assassination of Thomas, the Albanians besieged Janina with Ottoman aid.[374] The civil war that arose around the widow of Thomas prepared the way for the Osmanlis to extend their rule to the Gulf of Arta.

In 1385, Khaïreddin pasha, who had occupied Okrida, the ancient ecclesiastical seat of the Bulgarians, a day’s journey west of Monastir, was invited by Charles Thopia, lord of Durazzo, to aid him in his war against Balsa, the most powerful Frankish prince of Albania. Khaïreddin was glad of the opportunity afforded by this overture. He crossed the mountains to Elbasan, and then turned southward to meet Balsa. The first battle of the Osmanlis in Albania was fought in the salt-wastes of Savra, on the left bank of the river Devol. The Osmanlis faced fighting men who were fully their equals in courage, in resourcefulness, in strength, and in willingness to engage in a hand-to-hand struggle to death. The issue was long in doubt, and the victory costly. Balsa and his ally and guest, Ivanitch, son of krai Vukasin, were killed.[375] The Osmanlis gained one important result from this battle. Albanian renegades joined their army in great numbers.[376] From that day to this the Albanian element in the Ottoman army, especially among its officers, has been a source of strength which cannot be over-estimated.

It is doubtful if the Osmanlis withdrew from Albania, even temporarily, after the battle of Savra; for in 1388 the princess of Valona (Avlona) was so hard pressed by the Osmanlis that she put her domains under the protection of Venice.[377]

In northern Albania, the invaders captured Croia and Scutari in 1386. Scutari was given back by Murad in exchange for the addition of a member of the ruling family of Zenta to his harem. From Croia, also, the Osmanlis withdrew. Murad did not want to excite and alarm Venice at the moment when Philippe de Mézières was preaching so vigorously and successfully a new crusade.[378]

The plain in which four tributaries join the Isker is the very heart of the Balkan peninsula, almost equidistant from the Adriatic, the Aegaean, and the Black Sea. Here the three great ranges of the West Balkan, the Central Balkan, and the Rhodope Mountains converge, and three important rivers find their source. The Struma flows south through Macedonia, the Isker north-east through a canyon of the Balkans into the Danube, and the Nisava north-west into the Morava. In the middle of the southern border of this plain, under the shadow of a lofty mountain, lies Sofia.

The way to Sofia had been opened by the battle of Samakov. But its occupation was not the next logical step to Murad until the valleys of the Vardar and the Struma had been conquered. The occupation of Sofia was a temptation splendidly resisted in 1371. In 1381 it was a necessity. For it opened the path to trans-Balkan Bulgaria and to Serbia, and Murad was now ready to extend his conquest to the Danube by way of the Isker and the Morava.

The Slavic chronicles are silent concerning the fall of Sofia. From the late Ottoman accounts, it would seem that the city was intermittently besieged for several years. Then a young Osmanli, who had entered the city as refugee, and had become the confidant and falconer of its commandant, betrayed him. He urged his master in a chase some distance in front of his followers, and fell upon him in a mountain gorge. The commandant was bound to his horse, and taken a prisoner to Ishtiman. Indje Balaban, son of the general of Osman who had besieged Brusa for ten years, brought his army from Philippopolis, and paraded the commandant, garrotted, under the walls of Sofia. The Bulgarians, discouraged and despairing of aid, surrendered.[379] We can be certain neither of the name of the Bulgarian commandant nor of the date of the surrender. But it was probably in 1385.[380] Bulgaria up to the main Balkan range was now Ottoman territory.

The fall of Nish, in the summer of 1386, marked the next extension of Murad’s empire.[381] The Serbians did not yield without a struggle, as the Bulgarians had done. Nish was taken by assault. Lazar secured peace only by increasing the amount of his tribute and adding one thousand cavaliers to his contingent in the Ottoman army.[382]

Nish was sixteen days by carriage from Constantinople. Murad was now master of four-fifths of the great Roman highway from Belgrade to the Bosphorus; for Tchorlu, Demotika, Adrianople, Philippopolis, Ishtiman, Sofia, and Nish were in his hands. Nish was also the point where the road from Belgrade to Salonika turned southward. Practically all but the last day’s journey of the road across the Balkan peninsula from Constantinople to Durazzo on the Adriatic was Ottoman territory. In Asia Minor, Murad held the ancient highway from Constantinople to Trebizond as far as Angora, and the road which the pilgrims and Crusaders, Jerusalem-bent, had travelled as far as Ak Sheïr. From Angora to Nish took twenty-five days; from Constantinople to Durazzo seventeen days.[383] Twenty-five years before, when Murad came to the chieftainship of the Osmanlis, the Ottoman dominions could have been traversed in any direction in three days.

XIII

The treaty concluded between the Byzantines and Genoese in 1386 affords a striking illustration of Murad’s power after the Nish campaign. This treaty, whose text has been preserved, was signed by John and Andronicus Palaeologos, the podesta of Pera, and the Genoese ambassador. John Palaeologos bound himself to live in peace with his son Andronicus, and to move his army against all the enemies of Genoa ‘except Morat bey and his Turks’. The Genoese in turn promised to defend Constantinople ‘against all enemies of whatever nationality except the said Morat bey and his Turks, who acted according to the will of the said Morat bey’! Throughout the treaty, Murad is carefully excepted on both sides.[384]

Genoa made a formal treaty with Murad in 1385. Favours were granted to the Osmanlis who did business in Pera, in return for liberty to Genoese merchants to reside and conduct business in the states of Murad. The treaty recalls the friendship of the Genoese for Orkhan, and speaks of Murad as ‘the magnificent and powerful lord of lords, Moratibei, grand admiral[385] and lord of the admirals of Turchie’.[386] But in the very next year Genoa secretly joined an offensive league with Cyprus, Scio (Chios) and Mytilene ‘against that Turk, son of unrighteousness and evil, and also of the Holy Cross Morat bey, and his sect, who are attempting so grievously to attack the Christian race’.[387]

In the first year of Murad’s reign, the Venetian energy had become so sapped by prosperity and luxury that the Senate passed a sumptuary law.[388] The recent triumph over Genoa had given them a belief in their invincibility. Their self-sufficiency, and the growing disinclination to lay aside the pen and ledger for the sword and shield, were alarming symptoms of decay. The lesson of the Genoese at Chioggia was needed to teach the Venetians that the struggle for existence never ceases.

In spite of their vital interest in the development of the Levant, and the power that their wealth gave them in a generation when fighting strength could be purchased so easily, Venice made no effort to oppose the progress of Ottoman conquest. On the contrary, in 1368, long before an invasion of Albania was imminent, the Senate negotiated with the Osmanlis for the reddition of Scutari. This project was again taken up in 1384, in a tentative way, during negotiations to fix the customs-duties of Venetian merchant-vessels.[389] Following the example of Ragusa and Genoa, Venice concluded, in 1388, a commercial treaty with Murad.[390]

The traffic of the Italian republics with the Moslems had been denounced by Gregory X in 1272, by Boniface VIII in 1299, by Urban V in 1366, and by Gregory XI in 1372.[391] In vain the popes exhorted; in vain they threatened interdict and excommunication; in vain they held up to execration the abominable slave traffic. Trade interests alone decided the policies of the maritime cities. Their citizens never hesitated to cut each other’s throats for the opportunity of selling goods. To them the crusades were a purely commercial proposition. More than once the archives of Venice reveal the approval of the Senate upon the action of merchants who warned Moslem princes of the crusaders’ intentions. Guillaume d’Adam declared with reason that the Saracens maintained their supremacy in the Holy Land and Egypt through the support of the traders, who furnished them with Christian slaves to keep up their armies.[392] Genoa passed laws in 1315 and in 1340 against the slave traffic of the Black Sea,[393] but these laws were never enforced.[394]

Venice and Genoa turned a deaf ear to papal remonstrances and to papal appeals for aid in crusades against the Osmanlis. For the sake of preserving their commerce, they flattered Murad, and aided him, indirectly at least, to subjugate the Christians of the Levant. Their children of the third and fourth generation paid to the descendants of Murad the penalty of their greed. They lost their commerce in trying to save it.

XIV

It was not until 1387 that Murad believed himself strong enough to measure arms with Karamania. His son-in-law, Alaeddin, whose name is reminiscent of the earlier glory of Konia, was emir of the most powerful state in Anatolia. The Ottoman historians have represented Alaeddin’s resistance of the encroachment of the Osmanlis, and his defiance of Murad, as rebellion, and have been blindly followed in this by most of the European historians. Such a conception of the conflict between the Osmanlis and the Karamanlis is far from the truth. There is no record of when and how Karamania had become subject to Murad. In fact, up to 1387, Murad had not yet extended his sovereignty over all of Tekke and Hamid, the states which bordered Karamania on the west.

Neither Alaeddin himself nor his predecessors had ever acknowledged the suzerainty of the house of Osman. From the standpoint of the Karamanians, the Ottoman emir was not even _primus inter pares_ of the Turkish princes in Anatolia. Osman had probably not been known by name to the founder of the house of Karaman. Orkhan never came into direct contact with the Karamanlis. Murad, at the beginning of his reign, had indirectly gained an advantage over the emir of Karaman in the successful issue of his expedition against the Phrygian chiefs and the capture of Angora. Fifteen years later his accessions of territory in Kermian, Hamid, and Tekke brought him into rivalry with Alaeddin. But it was the prestige and power gained by Murad in European conquests that made him a rival to be reckoned with. The first acknowledgement of his growing strength was the marriage alliance between the houses of these two emirs. Alaeddin, however, did not by this marriage constitute himself a vassal of his father-in-law. The letters of Murad to Alaeddin in the collection of Feridun are couched in terms of equality.

Murad rallied his army at Kutayia for the first great Ottoman campaign in Asia. He could not muster enough Osmanlis to undertake so formidable a feat as the invasion of Karamania, and had to rely upon large contingents of Greeks and Serbians, who were sent to him, in accordance with their conventions, by his vassals, the emperor John and the kral Lazar.[395] The Balkan soldiers, under the command of Bayezid, formed the left wing of the Ottoman army.

Battle was joined in the great plain before Konia, which has so often been the scene of Ottoman triumphs and reverses. The Ottoman historians declare that Alaeddin was defeated, largely through the bravery of Timurtash, and represent the battle of Konia as a decisive victory, which ‘put down the rebellion’. According to them, Alaeddin ‘sued for peace’. Murad ‘forgave’ him, because he was moved by the tearful pleadings of his daughter, Alaeddin’s wife.[396]

But the net result of the costly expedition was the reconciliation of the two emirs. The only result recorded by the Ottoman historians is that Alaeddin kissed Murad’s hands! Murad withdrew to Kutayia without annexing any portion of the Karamanian emirate, without booty, and without promise either of tribute or military contingents for the European wars. Had Murad actually accomplished more than merely holding his own in the battle of Konia, the campaign would not have ended so profitlessly. Granting the Ottoman victory, Murad’s conduct after the battle is inconsistent with his whole life and character. We are compelled to discard the story of a decisive victory. It must be that Murad, who had been able to reduce to vassalage the Byzantines, the Bulgarians, and the Serbians, found himself unable, even with the help of his European allies, to break the power of this rival Anatolian emir.

XV

During the Karamanian campaign, Murad adopted the policy of treating non-combatants in a friendly fashion. Strict orders were given to refrain from violence and looting. Murad hoped to win the Karamanlis by kindness, and to pave the way for a later assimilation. It was the first campaign undertaken against fellow Moslems. The Serbian contingent, who cared nothing for the success of this policy, and who claimed that they had been promised booty in return for their services, did not obey the order. A number of them were summarily executed.[397]

When the survivors returned to their homes in the spring of 1388, they complained bitterly of the way they had been treated, and declared that service in the Ottoman army, for the Christian all risk and no gain, was nothing less than a slavery leading to death. This discontent gave Lazar the opportunity for which he had long been looking. He decided to profit by the resentment of the Serbians against Murad,[398] and make a supreme effort to free Serbia from the menace of the Ottoman yoke, which had grown very real since the capture of Nish.

The Slavs of upper Serbia and of Bosnia realized the imminence of an Ottoman invasion, and they were now ready--or at least they appeared to be ready--to rally around Lazar. Up to this time the Serbians had never recognized Lazar as the leader of the race.

The pan-Serbian alliance was made possible by the adhesion of Tvrtko, kral of Bosnia. He had come into prominence after the battle of Cernomen as a supporter of Lazar against the sons of Vukasin and other Serbian chieftains who were dissatisfied with the election of Lazar. But in return for his aid, he got under his control a large part of upper Serbia, including Milesevo, which was the burial-place of St. Sava, apostle to the Serbians. In 1376, he crowned himself ‘king of Bosnia and Serbia’ on the tomb of St. Sava, placing upon his head the two crowns, and changing his name to Stephen. Neither Louis of Hungary nor Lazar was consulted by Tvrtko, and he took no measures to secure their assent to his pretensions. After his coronation, he conquered Cattaro, and fought successfully with Balza of Albania.[399]

In 1383 Tvrtko had become so powerful on the Dalmatian coast that the Senate recognized him as ‘king of Serbia, Bosnia and the Riviera’, and bestowed upon him the privilege of Venetian citizenship.[400] It was evidently the intention of Venice to favour Tvrtko as an opponent to Louis of Hungary, who had himself taken in 1382 the title of ‘king of Serbia, Dalmatia and Bulgaria’.[401] Venice lost her grip upon or interest in the east coast of the Adriatic for a few years immediately following the treaty of Turin. We have already seen how in 1384 the Senate professed a willingness to treat with the Osmanlis on the basis of giving up Scutari. In 1385 they became indifferent to currying further the favour of Tvrtko, and sent an embassy to press him for the payment of money due to Venice.[402] Tvrtko continued to consolidate his position on the Dalmatian coast, until the capture of Nish influenced him to aid Lazar against the Osmanlis.

It was not a moment too soon. An Ottoman army had already crossed the Vardar and was marching forward for the invasion of Bosnia. Thirty thousand Serbians and Bosnians under the command of Tvrtko and Lazar met the invading army at Plochnik, in the valley of the Toplika. Of twenty thousand Osmanlis scarcely one-fifth escaped death or captivity.[403] The Bosnians successfully opposed two other Ottoman armies at Rudnik and Biletchia.[404]

A delirium of joy spread through the Slavic population of the Balkans at the news of the battle of Plochnik. The uninterrupted chain of thirty years of Ottoman victories had been broken. The slavery and horror of military service with the Osmanlis, price of their vassalage, so vividly depicted by the survivors of the Karamanian campaign, had made the Slavs desperate. This victory, following closely upon the moral revolt against the Osmanlis, gave them hope. The South Slavs are like children in the extremes of their emotions. Tears to laughter--laughter to tears: easily despairing, as easily hopeful, and from as little cause. The slightest reverse brings distrust in their ability to cope with forces that have once successfully opposed them. Slight success brings overwhelming confidence, and leads to colossal mistakes of judgement. With this trait of character is coupled an intuitive distrust of one’s neighbour, of the disinterestedness of his motives, and an intuitive resentment of ‘the other fellow’ doing something better than you do it. This makes impossible solidarity and _esprit de corps_. The South Slavic character explains the series of events which brought the Serbians to their final and irretrievable disaster.

Around Lazar the Serbian nobles rallied as they had never rallied before. Kral Tvrtko of Bosnia, George Kastriota of Albania, and the minor princes of Albania and Serbia joined in an alliance against the Osmanlis. The two remaining successors of Alexander of Bulgaria, Sisman and Ivanko, son of Dobrotich, threw off their allegiance to Murad, and promised contingents for the common struggle. The prince of Wallachia assured Lazar of the co-operation of the Rumanians.

Venice, fearing lest Murad fall upon the Peloponnesus to seek vengeance for the defeat of Plochnik, tried to form a league of all the Greek and Frankish lords in the Morea and central Greece.[405] As far as one can judge from the records, the effort of Venice was an intention rather than an action. It did not get beyond the paper stage. The Senate gave to the Slavic alliance no encouragement more substantial than words. On the other hand, some of the border nobles of the Hungarian banats, of their own volition, informed Lazar of their intention to co-operate in an offensive movement against the Osmanlis.

XVI

Murad did not set his army in motion against the Serbians immediately after the disaster at Plochnik. There was none of that feverish haste which had characterized his movements when he received the news of the Serbian and Hungarian crusade in 1363. For while the victory had aroused in the Balkan Christians a determination that they must drive the Osmanlis out of Europe, and a feeling that they could accomplish this end, its immediate result had been merely to repel the projected Ottoman invasion of Bosnia. Ali pasha disposed of sufficient forces to hold the conquests that had already been made. Murad had come to know the people with whom he was dealing. It was not so much to recruit his own army as to give the allies time to fall out with each other that Murad remained in Asia during the early months of 1388. To strike in the first flush of enthusiasm and buoyant hope would have brought him face to face with a united enemy. If he waited, he knew from past experience with the Balkan princes that the poison of jealousy would permeate the ranks of his ostensibly united enemies. The Osmanlis never made a mistake of judgement in dealing with Balkan alliances until the autumn of 1912.

Far from planning an offensive movement against the Serbians, Murad allowed Evrenos of Yanitza to lead a band of Ottoman mercenaries into the Morea, at the invitation of Theodore Palaeologos, to support the authority of the Byzantine Empire against the Frankish barons.[406] At the same time he ordered Ali pasha to cross the Balkans into northern Bulgaria.

Ali pasha started from Adrianople in the spring of 1388 with thirty thousand men to complete the conquest of Bulgaria. He crossed the Balkans by the pass north of Aïtos, which has ever since been called by the Osmanlis Nadir Derbend from the neighbouring town of Nadirkeuy.[407] Provadia was taken by surprise in the night. Shuman and the villages around it were next conquered. After an unsuccessful attack upon Varna, the Osmanlis retraced their steps through Provadia and Shuman, following the line of the modern railway from Varna to Sofia. Tirnovo, the ancient capital of Bulgaria, capitulated after a short struggle.

Sisman withdrew to the Danube through the valley of the Osma, and shut himself up in the fortress of Nicopolis. Owing to the ease of provisioning from the river side, it was impossible to starve him out. Ali pasha was compelled to call upon Murad, who had just crossed over from Asia to Thrace. When Murad arrived before Nicopolis, Sisman sued for peace. The conditions of Murad, that he pay the tribute due from the previous year and allow an Ottoman garrison to occupy the fortress of Drster as gage of future good conduct, were gladly accepted.

No sooner had Murad started southward than Sisman decided upon a final desperate resistance. He refused to give up Drster. But he had forgotten that Ali pasha was master of Shuman and the route to Varna. The Osmanlis took Drster by storm. Many villages along the Danube between Rustuk and Nicopolis fell into the hands of the Osmanlis. Ali pasha besieged Sisman for a second time in Nicopolis. The revelation of his own weakness and of the strength of the Osmanlis was a crushing blow to Sisman. He surrendered without conditions, and was taken, with his wife and children, to Murad’s camp. For reasons which the chroniclers do not indicate, Sisman was able to secure forgiveness and restoration to his former position as vassal prince of Bulgaria. But the Osmanlis were now installed in north-central Bulgaria up to the Danube River. Shuman and Nicopolis were Ottoman fortresses. Sisman had been rendered impotent to give effective aid in the great alliance.[408]

XVII

Not all the Christians were loyal to the cause of Balkan freedom. In their conquest of the Balkan peninsula, it is remarkable that the Osmanlis never fought a battle without the help of allies of the faith and blood of those whom they were putting under the Moslem yoke. At the beginning of this chapter, it has been shown that there is no historical basis for the assertion that the Osmanlis conquered the Balkan states by the use of the janissaries. But they did have Christian aid of a far more powerful kind than the janissaries could have given them. The old fiction of the janissaries won for the Balkan people the sympathies of western Europe. The truth concerning the Christian aid which the Moslem conquerors received alienates rather than wins our sympathies.

When, in the spring of 1389, Murad found himself ready to exact vengeance for Plochnik, and started from Bulgaria on his punitive expedition, he was joined by Constantine of Kustendil, by the Serbian Dragash, to whom he had given Serres as fief, and even by the sons of Vukasin, the Serbian kral who had been killed in 1371 at Cernomen.[409] Balsa, prince of Zenta (upper Albania), postponed his march to join the allies, and entered secretly into correspondence with Murad through a Serbian nobleman in the Ottoman camp. Lazar knew of this treachery. He knew also that some of his own lieutenants had in all probability arranged to sell him out to the Ottoman emir.[410]

Kossovapol, the plain of the blackbirds, is the name given to the valley of the Sitnika River (an upper tributary of the Morava) west of Pristina and south of Mitrovitza.[411] Here the decisive battle for Serbian independence was fought on June 20, 1389.[412]

Serbian chronicles state that Murad had enjoined upon his soldiers that they should neither destroy nor sack the rich castles, villages, and cities of this region after the battle. Only four castles in all were destroyed.[413] This command shows that Murad was confident of the outcome. He was fighting for the possession of this country, for the wealth and the prestige that it would give him. He had no intention of destroying what he knew would be his to enjoy, nor did he desire to alienate the Serbian peasantry by unnecessary harshness. Here, as elsewhere, new Osmanlis rather than Ottoman subjects were the _desiderata_: they could be won only by kindness. Since the clemency of the Osmanlis in dealing with the vanquished after the battle is frankly recorded by the Serbians themselves, we cannot doubt that the wise and far-seeing provisions of the conqueror were carried out.

Of Kossova much has been written. It was the culminating event in that legendary period of Serbian history which had begun fifty years before with the exploits of Stephen Dushan. Lazar, Serbian chieftain with no long line of royal ancestors behind him, with no great weight of authority among his contemporaries, who began his career by craven submission to Murad and, after eighteen years in which no deed to his credit is recorded, survived a crushing defeat to be executed on the field of battle--this is the Charlemagne of Serbian poetry. On the anniversary of Kossova, the Serbians pray for his soul. As a saint, he gets many more candles at his shrine than his namesake of Bethany who was raised from the dead. Such is legend in history. But what amazes one is the curious fact that the very folksongs that glorify Saint Lazar and lament Kossova reveal a frank and true picture of the events, and prove how little warrant there is for the legend!

The Serbians despaired of their cause before the battle. The enormous number of the enemy dismayed them.[414] Rumours of treachery were current in the allied camp. Their lack of courage, and the spirit of distrust of each other’s good faith, is strikingly voiced in the oration of Lazar at a banquet the evening before the battle. He pleaded for a courage and confidence which he himself did not feel. He openly accused his son-in-law, Milosh Obravitch, of treason. Gloom and hopelessness had settled over the Serbian camp, reflected from leaders to the common soldiery. The battle was already lost. For victory is never won by those who feel that they are going to lose.[415]

The battle was begun by the Osmanlis. Murad sent forward an advance guard of two thousand archers.[416] The allies responded with a charge in which the left wing of the Ottoman army was broken through by Lazar. For a while the issue seemed in doubt. Bayezid held out against the impetuosity of the Serbians, but the Osmanlis made no attempt to take the offensive. At this critical juncture, when the battle was by no means decided, Vuk Brankovitch, another son-in-law of Lazar, quietly withdrew from the field with twelve thousand men. This desertion, which had probably been arranged for with Murad, so weakened the Serbians that they broke and fled. Lazar and many of his leading noblemen, and thousands of his soldiers, were taken prisoners. It was not a fight to the bitter end.[417]

Murad won the battle of Kossova at the cost of his own life. From the story which Clavijo de Gonzáles heard fifteen years later, one might infer that Murad was killed in the course of the battle, and that the fighting was renewed around his body.[418] It was then that Bayezid cut down Lazar with his own sword. Pray declared that the two sovereigns were mortally wounded in a personal combat.[419] The Ottoman historians believed that Murad met his death when walking across the field after the battle. A wounded Serbian soldier, who was believed to be dead, rose with a supreme effort to his knees and thrust his sword into Murad as he passed.

According to the Serbian songs, whose testimony the Byzantine historians corroborate, and whose story has been followed by some Osmanlis as well, Murad was assassinated after the battle, or perhaps while the battle was in progress, by Milosh Obravitch. Stung by the unjust accusation of treason in the speech of Lazar on the eve of the battle,[420] Milosh determined to prove his loyalty beyond any question. He got through the Ottoman ranks as a deserter, of whom there must have been many on that fatal day. His claim of high rank, which was attested by his princely bearing, secured for him an audience with Murad. When he was face to face with the emir, he plunged his dagger into the destroyer of his country’s liberties. It is a commentary on the Serbian character that this questionable act has been held up to posterity as the most saintly and heroic deed of national history.

In the seventeenth century it was believed, and this belief has been reproduced as a fact by some modern writers on the Ottoman Empire, that the custom of holding a foreign ambassador’s arms when he entered the presence of the sultan, originated from a regulation to prevent the recurrence of such a crime.[421] Like many other Ottoman customs, however, this consistorial ceremony is found among the usages of the Byzantine court,[422] and has persisted in some oriental courts to the present day. It has been explained on the ground that ‘a stranger before the sovereign is so overwhelmed by the effulgence of his rays that he cannot stand without support’.[423]

The statements of the numbers engaged in the battle of Kossova are so conflicting that it is impossible to determine how many men took part in the action, or which side was the stronger. The Serbian folksongs dwell upon the tremendous number of the enemy, while the Ottoman historians report that the Osmanlis mustered so few in comparison with the reported strength of the Serbians that there was serious question before the battle of the advisability of taking so great a risk as to engage a foe whose numerical advantage was so marked. Including the prisoners, who were massacred when Murad’s death was learned by the soldiers, the Serbians calculated their loss at seventy-seven thousand killed, while only twelve thousand of the Osmanlis fell. One important fact we do know. The loss of life during the battle and subsequent massacre on the part of the Serbian nobility was so great that the nation, for the third time within thirty years, found itself without leaders.

Tvrtko hurried away from Kossova so fast that he did not realize how overwhelming had been the defeat. In fact, when he learned of the death of Murad, he wrote to Florence announcing the glorious victory won under his leadership, and the death of the arch enemy of Christendom.[424] The Florentines, therefore, celebrated the news of Kossova with a _Te Deum_ in the cathedral. Either this perverted account also reached France, or too great significance was placed upon the death of Murad, for Charles VI went to Notre Dame to render thanks to God in all solemnity for what had happened at Kossova![425] The Serbians themselves were not deceived. To them, Kossova was the death-knell to independence. The Hungarians, also, awoke immediately to a sense of the danger that threatened them.

XVIII

For thirty years Murad had guided the destinies of the Osmanlis with a political sagacity surpassed by no statesman of his age. It is only because we know so much more of Mohammed the Conqueror and of Soleiman the Magnificent that Murad has never received his proper place as the most remarkable and most successful statesman and warrior of the house of Osman. When we measure the difficulties which confronted him, the problems which he solved, and the results of his reign, against the deeds of his more dazzling successors, we see how easily he stands with them, if not above them. The transformation effected in his lifetime is one of the most wonderful records in all history. His conquests were to endure for five centuries, until the Treaty of Berlin, in 1878: some of them have survived the cataclysm of the recent Balkan wars.

His energy and zeal for fighting, so like his father’s, and yet put to the test of being extended over a field of action far wider than his father ever dreamed of, did not flag. He never had a disagreement with any of his generals or administrators. His system of conquest and of government, unsupported by tradition or the background of a gradual growth, fitted every condition for which it had been framed. His treatment of the Greeks showed superb skill in estimating their character. Although an infidel and enemy of Christ in the eyes of the Byzantine ecclesiastics, he handled them so much better than the popes that he won their sympathies. No more striking proof of his complete success in a problem of assimilation, at once racial as well as religious, can be found than the letter of the Orthodox patriarch written to Pope Urban VI in 1385, in which it is stated that Murad left to the Church entire liberty of action.[426] In the records of the Greek patriarchate from 1360 to 1389,[427] one does not find a single instance of complaint received of ill treatment of the priesthood by the Osmanlis.

Osman gathered around him a race, Orkhan created a state, but it was Murad who founded the empire.