Decline & Fall - Byzantium 03 (48 page)

To the east, once the Catalans had l
eft Anatolia in 1304, the Turks
continued to advance. In that very year the tribe of Aydin took Ephesus; in 1307 Othman seized the fortress of Trikokkia, thereby destroying communications between Nicomedia and Nicaea; and in 1308, by their capture of Iconium, the Karamans finally put an end — after over two centuries - to the long-moribund Seljuk Sultanate. In 1309 Byzantium suffered a further loss, when the island of Rhodes (which had for some time been effectively controlled by the Genoese) fell to the Knights of St John.
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With every day that passed, it seemed, the Empire diminished, its Emperor having long ago given up any hope of stemming the Turkish tide.

In Constantinople, the Arsenites became ever more troublesome. What little comfort they might have derived from the departure of the puritanical firebrand Athanasius in 1293 was taken from them when, at the Emperor's insistence, he was reinstated ten years later;
2
and by 1304 their behaviour had become such that Andronicus — all his attempts to appeal to their better natures having failed - put an armed guard on their monastery at Mosele. When, in the year following, another plot against his life was discovered just in time and its chief instigator, a certain John Drimys, was found to have close Arsenite connections, Andronicus ordered the monastery to be closed for good and many of its members put under arrest. By now, however, the movement was rapidly losing impetus. John Lascaris, blind and imprisoned, no longer seemed so desirable a candidate for the throne as he had twenty years before; besides, most of the old Empire of Nicaea had already fallen to the Turks. In 1309 Patriarch Athanasius - who was said to have looked upon Byzantium as one vast monastery - retired to his own smaller one, this time for good; and his successor Niphon immediately set to work to heal the Arsenite schism once and for all. He achieved his object within a year: on 14 September 1310, in the course of a dramatically impressive ceremony at St Sophia, the Orthodox Church was formally reunited.

To Andronicus, the relief must have been immense; but in the same year he was faced with a new enemy - his own wife Irene, the former

1
The Knights Hospitaller of St John of Jerusalem were, like the Templars, a military Order which had been obliged to leave Palestine after the fall of Acre in
1291.
They were to make their headquarters in Rhodes (where their splendid Hospital still survives) un
til the island's capture by Sule
yman the Magnificent in
1522,
soon after which they moved to Malta.

2
Athanasius had enjoyed a remarkable stroke of good luck. On
15
January
1303
he had proclaimed from his monastic refuge that the divine wrath would shortly fall upon the people of Constantinople; that same night there was a minor earthquake, which was followed by a considerably more serious one two days afterwards.

Yolanda of Montferrat. The eleven-year-old girl he had married had turned into a formidably ambitious and self-willed woman, and for some time relations between the two had been growing ever more tense. Matters came to a head when Irene proposed that on her husband's death the Empire should not pass to Michael IX alone but should be divided among all four sons - the younger three being of course her own. Predictably - and rightly - Andronicus rejected the idea out of hand; whereupon the Empress accused him of favouritism towards his first-born and left Constantinople with her three boys for Thessalonica which, besides being her childhood home, had the additional advantage of relative proximity to her daughter Simonis, now sixteen, at the Bulgar court. There she remained for the next seven years until her death, constantly intriguing against her husband with anyone who would listen to her.

Another resident of Thessalonica - he must have arrived shortly after his stepmother - was the co-Emperor Michael. Though still only in his middle thirties, he was already disappointed and disillusioned. A brave but disastrously untalented soldier, he had spent much of his adult life on campaign without ever winning a major battle. Apart from a few insignificant victories over the Bulgars in 1304, his career had been marked by defeat after defeat, first in Asia Minor and later in the Balkans. His most recent debacle had been at the hands of an army of some two thousand Turks who, after having joined the Catalans, had remained in Thrace when the latter moved into Greece and were to terrorize the region for the next two years, helping themselves to what little there was left to pillage and seriously disrupting communications. Early in 1311 Michael had led an army against them, with the usual catastrophic result. After this he had been relieved of his military command and had retired into private life.

By his Armenian wife Maria (her original name, Rita, having been replaced as was customary by a more respectable-sounding Byzantine one) Michael had four children - the eldest of whom, Andronicus, an intelligent and outstandingly good-looking boy, was in turn crowned co-Emperor at the age of nineteen in February 1316. There were now three Emperors sharing the throne, and the succession should have been assured for at least two more generations to come. Young Andronicus, however, soon began to show signs of dangerous instability. He drank, he gambled, he caroused, he ran up hideous debts with the Genoese in Galata; and he was notoriously fond of women. The year after his coronation he was married off to a noble German lady of stultifying tedium named Adelaide of Brunswick-Grubenhagen; but after the birth of one child (who died in infancy) he took little interest in her and reverted to his old ways — if indeed he had ever abandoned them.

By now the young man's behaviour was beginning to cause his father and grandfather serious anxiety; but matters were brought to a head only in 1320 when, suspecting one of his mistresses of infidelity, he carefully laid an ambush for his unknown rival near her house. Whether that rival really was his own brother Manuel or whether Manuel just chanced to be passing at the wrong moment is not altogether certain; in any case he was set upon and killed. Michael IX, when the news was brought to him, was still mourning the death of his daughter Anna;
1
he was already a sick man, and this second shock was more than he could bear. He went into a decline and died on 12 October at Thessalonica. Andronicus II furiously disowned his grandson and named his own younger son Constantine as heir to the throne of Byzantium.

The result was civil war.

The old Emperor was now sixty years old - a considerable age in Byzantine dmes - and during the nearly forty years that he had been on the throne the situation in the Empire had gone from bad to worse. He was fortunate to have as his chief adviser (and later Grand Logothete) the writer and scholar Theodore Metochites, who served him devotedly from 1290 until the end of his reign; but even Theodore was powerless to stop the decline. Thrace was devastated, Asia Minor virtually lost. In the absence of a navy or merchant fleet, trade - and food supplies - were in the hands of the perpetually squabbling Venetians and Genoese. Taxes were being increased year by year; the revenue was spent, however, not on rearmament but on tribute - protection money to the Catalans and Turks, paid in the hopes that they would thereby be persuaded to leave imperial territory alone. No wonder that, when the young Andronicus refused to accept his grandfather's decree and raised the flag of rebellion in Adrianople, there were many in the capital - particularly among the younger generation of the nobility and landowning classes -who rallied enthusiastically to his support.

At the young Emperor's right hand was John Cantacuzenus, one of

1
Anna's first husband had been Thomas, Despot of Epirus; but in
1
3
1
8
Thomas had been murdered by his nephew Nicholas
Orsini, the Italian Count of Ce
phalonia, who had immediately adopted the Orthodox faith, established himself in Epirus as his uncle's successor and married his widow. Anna herself had died two years later.

the leading members of the military aristocracy: his father had been Governor of the Morea, and he himself was an important landowner in the Empire, possessing huge estates in Macedonia, Thrace and Thessaly. Though he was a year or two older than Andronicus, they had been close friends since childhood; and John, whether as
eminence grise,
Grand Domestic, reluctant rebel or Emperor, was to dominate the Byzantine political scene for much of the century. Equally important for posterity, he was to write a long and detailed history of the Empire between 13 20 and 1356, drawing largely on his own memories of people and events and frequently quoting from original documents. Inevitably, it is to some extent biased in his own favour; but since he was the most outstanding soldier and statesman of his day it is certainly not to be dismissed on that account.

Second only to John Cantacuzenus in importance among the supporters of Andronicus III was a certain Syrgiannes Palaeologus. He was in fact a minor member of the imperial family only through his mother, his father having been of Cuman descent; and, as we shall see, he was to prove an unreliable ally. He and John, however, had both bought governorships for themselves in Thrace — the sale of offices was not the least of the abuses that had grown up under the Palaeologi - where they had immediately set to work fanning the flames of dissatisfaction among the local populace, already crushed under the ever-increasing weight of imperial taxation. At Easter 1321 the young Emperor joined them. If Gregoras is to be believed, one of his first acts was to exempt the entire province from paying any taxes at all; and by means of this and other extravagant promises he quickly won the support he needed. Syrgiannes then marched on the capital where old Andronicus, terrified lest the revolt should spread, hastily came to terms. By 6 June the two sides had agreed on a partition of the Empire. Andronicus II was to rule on the Bosphorus as before, Andronicus III in Adrianople.

Only a few years previously, when the Empress Irene had made a similar proposal, it had been received with horror; the fact that it was now so readily agreed shows all too clearly how far the Emperor's position had deteriorated in the past decade. To preserve some semblance of unity, old Andronicus insisted that responsibility for foreign policy should be his alone; but almost from the first his grandson showed himself determined to follow his own diplomatic path, and before long there were effectively two separate Empires pursuing completely different policies, more often than not in active opposition to each other.

In such circumstances peace could no
t endure for long, and early in
1322 hostilities were resumed. They seem to have been caused, strangely enough, by Syrgiannes himself. He had always been jealous of John Cantacuzenus, whom he rightly believed to enjoy the special favour of the young Emperor; and this jealousy now led him to change sides. Returning to Constantinople, he went straight to old Andronicus and encouraged him to teach his grandson a lesson. But it was no use. In both Thrace and Macedonia the rebels were too popular, and it soon became clear that if the old man continued to oppose them he might very probably lose such territories that remained in his control. In July 1322 the two Emperors reached a settlement for the second time. There was no longer to be any question of partition; both were now to rule jointly over the whole Empire, while Andronicus III was reconfirmed as sole heir. Andronicus II however would remain the senior, with the right of veto over any of his grandson's policies.

This time the peace lasted a full five years: years in the course of which, on 2 February 1325, Andronicus III was crowned for the second time in St Sophia and, on 6 April 1326, the Ottoman Turks captured Brusa after a seven-year siege and made it their capital.
1
More alarming even than this latter disaster was the news that Andronicus II's own nephew, the Governor of Thessalonica John Palaeologus, had announced his secession from the Empire. John was also the son-in-law of the Grand Logothete Theodore Metochites; and although Theodore himself remained as always loyal to his master, his two sons - who commanded the important military bases of Melnik and Strumica - immediately identified themselves with the rebellion. John then appealed for support to the Serbian King Stephen Dechanski (to whom he had given his daughter in marriage) and set off in person for the Serbian court.

Had he succeeded in forging an alliance with King Stephen, the Empire might well have been faced with a new and serious danger; in such an event grandfather and grandson might even have temporarily forgotten their rivalry and made common cause against the enemy. But John Palaeologus died, suddenly and unexpectedly, soon after his arrival in Skoplje; the immediate danger receded; and in the autumn of 1327 civil war broke out for the third time in less than seven years. On this occasion the two Emperors did not fight alone. Stephen Dechanski (whose young wife was, after all, the Emperor's great-niece) declared his

1
Brusa was actually taken by Orhan, the son of Othman. The latter died in the same year and did not live to see the new capital; but Orhan had his body brought there for burial in the citadel. Brusa thus became something of a shrine, and the burial-place of all the early Ottoman Sultans.

support for Andronicus II, while the Bulgar Tsar Michael Sisman — who had divorced his first wife, Stephen's sister, in order to marry Theodora, widow of Theodore Svetoslav and sister of Andronicus III — was only too happy to conclude an alliance with his new brother-in-law. As before, there was little serious fighting; it proved scarcely necessary, since young Andronicus - making more and more of those extravagant promises and donations that had served him so well in the past - was hailed wherever he appeared. In January 1328 he went with John Cantacuzenus to Thessalonica, where he was given a magnificent reception as
basileus.
Nearly all the
other principal cities and castl
es in Thrace and Macedonia sent messages of support.