Decline & Fall - Byzantium 03 (52 page)

But the conspirators had gone too far. What they had perpetrated was an outrage - and a cowardly one at that, taking advantage as they had of their victim's absence on the Empire's behalf, for what were quite obviously their own selfish ends; and when the imperial messengers reached Didymotichum the army supported John Cantacuzenus to a man. Then and there, on 26 October 1341, they proclaimed him
basileus.
He himself maintained his old reluctance, insisting that the young John V - though still uncrowned - remained the rightful Emperor; and there is no reason to to doubt his sincerity. After all, had he had any desire for the throne, he could easily have assumed it on the death of Andronicus; and among the several pages of his chronicle intended - needlessly - to justify his acceptance of it there is a curious and disarming passage in which, describing the ceremony of his investiture (when he ordered the names of the Empress Anne and John V to be proclaimed before those of himself and his wife Irene) he tells of how the hastily-prepared ceremonial robes failed to fit him, the inner one being impossibly tight, the outer several sizes too big.

But whatever his feelings in the matter, John Cantacuzenus was now Emperor, acclaimed in the traditional manner - though for the first time in centuries — by the army; and since there could clearly be no question of his recognition by the present regime in Constantinople, that could mean one thing only: the resumption of civil war. Within days of his investiture came news of his excommunication by the Patriarch; and on 19 November, John V was duly crowned in St Sophia. The lines of battle were drawn.

Not, however, in favour of John Cantacuzenus. For years, both in Constantinople and in the provinces, the rift had been widening between proletariat and aristocracy. As the enemies of Byzantium had continued their remorseless advance and increasing numbers of refugees from the conquered lands had come flooding into the capital, so the condition of the poor had become more and more desperate; the rich landowners on the other hand, who seldom paid their taxes and were in a position to take full advantage of the corruption which - at least till very recently - had been endemic, had remained relatively untouched.

Such wealth as existed in the impoverished Empire had thus become concentrated in the hands of the aristocratic few, while the majority of the population could feel only indignation and resentment. In most Western societies, the cities and towns had gradually produced a flourishing bourgeoisie of merchants and craftsmen, who provided a useful cushion between the wealthy and the proletariat; in the Byzantine Empire this had never occurred, and there was nothing to prevent the economic polarization which now became evident in all its ugliness. Alexius Apocaucus, in directing the mob against the property of the Grand Domestic, had unleashed dangerous forces indeed. The sack of John's palace had doubtless revealed riches such as the poor had never seen; his mother's, and those of his fellow-noblemen which had received similar treatment, had disgorged - by his own admission - prodigious quantities of food of all kinds, to say nothing of gold, silver and jewels. All this Apocaucus - who must for the first time have been grateful for his own humble origins - was able to turn to his own good use, setting himself up as the champion of the down-trodden and dispossessed against the forces of wealth and privilege personified by John Cantacuzenus.

The contagion spread with alarming rapidity. When, on the day following John's investiture, the news was announced in Adrianople, it provided a spark sufficient to ignite a revolt similar to that which had occurred in the capital. The local aristocracy, as might have been expected, sided with Cantacuzenus; but the populace immediately rose up against them, surging through the streets in an orgy of pillage and destruction. Those nobles who were not immediately seized fled for their lives; meanwhile a people's commune took over the city in the name of the regency and was duly recognized by Apocaucus, who sent his own son Manuel to Adrianople as his official representative. Within a few weeks all Thrace was up in arms, the landowning classes either hiding or in headlong flight. Events in Thessalonica were still more dramatic. The Governor, John's old friend Theodore Synadenus, at one moment secretly offered to open the gates; but he was driven out before he could do so. A political party known as the Zealots seized control in his place, setting up their own government and instituting a reign of terror against all who opposed them. Once again Apocaucus tried to impose his authority, sending his other son John as titular Governor; but the Zealots largely ignored him, and for the next seven years ran Thessalonica as a virtually independent republic.

By now John Cantacuzenus must have been close to despair. Little more than a month before, he had sti
ll enjoyed a unique position in
Constantinople, where he had exercised almost limitless power and was - a few political enemies apart - universally respected. He had a series of remarkable military and diplomatic victories behind him and was looking forward to the early surrender of the Morea - a development that might have brought Greece back into the Imperial fold and have proved a turning-point in the fortunes of Byzantium. Now he was outlawed, excommunicated and condemned as a public enemy of the Empire, to the service of which he had devoted his life. His house had been destroyed, his property looted, his estates confiscated. His mother had been driven from her home, dispossessed, and so ill-treated that she was to die a few weeks later. His closest friends had deserted him -including, as he now heard, Theodore Synadenus himself - aware that all those suspected of association with him risked the confiscation of their property and, very probably, imprisonment and death. His very name was being used as a symbol of the exploitation of the poor by the rich - an abuse against which he had struggled throughout his adult life. True, he was now an Emperor, by investiture if not by formal coronation; but he had never sought the imperial throne, and his enforced acceptance of it had served only to blacken him still further in the eyes of the legitimate Emperor, to whom his loyalty had even then never wavered.

More than anything, he needed allies. He sent an urgent message to his old friend Umur, Emir of Aydin; but Umur was far away, and for John Cantacuzenus time was now running dangerously short. And so he turned, after long hesitation, to Stephen Dushan. Knowing that Stephen had always been an enemy of the Empire and that such a step might consequently prove unpopular, before leaving for Serbia John gave his men the option of following him or not; he was not altogether surprised when only about two thousand agreed to do so. In his present position, on the other hand, he could not afford to be particular; he remembered also that, when he had briefly met the Serbian King on the frontier eight years before, the two had got on together remarkably well. On their second meeting in July 1342, at Prishtina near Skoplje, they fared even better. Stephen was only too ready to take advantage of the Empire's troubles. Had John Cantacuzenus been prepared to grant his request for the greater part of Byzantine Macedonia, he might have been yet more forthcoming; but he willingly agreed to give his new friend his protection and support, and as an earnest of his good intentions provided him with a detachment of mercenaries to assist him on his way back to Didymo-tichum. It was as well that he did: for John Cantacuzenus had advanced
no further than Serres when he found the road blocked against him. He was obliged to lay siege to the city itself, and while he was doing so his army fell victim to a hideous epidemic. Some fifteen hundred of his best men perished in a matter of weeks, and only with the greatest difficulty did he succeed in fighting his way back to the Serbian frontier. Now, in addition to his other anxieties, he found himself cut off from Didymot-ichum, his wife and his family.

Thanks to Stephen Dushan, Cantacuzenus was able to survive through the remainder of 1342. Then, shortly before Christmas, there came the news for which he had been hoping. Umur was on his way. The moment the Emir had received John's appeal he had begun to prepare his fleet. As soon as it was ready, he sailed northward up the Aegean to the mouth of the Maritsa river; thence he led his men to Didymotichum - which, despite its position, had remained loyal to Cantacuzenus — reinforced its defences and left a garrison. Owing to the appalling winter weather he was obliged to give up his plans to march across Thrace to join his old friend; but the help that he had afforded was invaluable, while the generosity, willingness and speed of his response gave John all the moral encouragement of which he was in such desperate need.

The tide was beginning to turn. In that same winter of 1342-3 the province of Thessaly declared in John's favour, and the coming of spring saw a similar voluntary submission on the part of several important towns of Macedonia. Apocaucus, seriously alarmed, arrived in Thessalonica with a naval squadron, but left quickly enough a week or two later when Umur's flagship appeared on the horizon, followed by a fleet of some two hundred ships. This time the two friends were able to make contact, and together they laid siege to Thessalonica. The city proved too strong for them, but with the help of the Emir's six thousand men Cantacuzenus was able to break through to Didymotichum, there to embrace his wife again after almost a year's separation.

In Constantinople - where food was now shorter than ever - morale was sinking fast. John Cantacuzenus's recent successes were bad enough; almost more terrible, however, to the Empress Anne and her entourage was the thought that the Turks were now on the loose in her European provinces. Umur's troops had wrought havoc wherever they had passed; the luckless populations of Thrace and Macedonia had had all too much experience of invading armies in the past, but even they had seldom suffered such brutality as this. It was by no means the first time that Turkish soldiers had bee
n brought to these regions: the
Catalans had introduced them thirty-five years before, as had Anne's own husband Andronicus during his long struggle with his grandfather. More recently still, the Empress herself had been in contact with the Emir Orhan, who had rejected her approaches only because he expected better things from her rival. Nevertheless she was terrified by the idea of these pagan barbarians, no longer confined to Asia but now, it seemed, at the very gates of the capital; and in the summer of 1343 she sent one of her Savoyard knights to Avignon with a despairing appeal to Pope Clement VI, announcing not only her own submission — she had after all been brought up in the Latin faith — but that of her son John, of Alexius Apocaucus and, most surprising by far, of the Patriarch of Constantinople, John Calecas himself.

At least where the last two were concerned, Anne was certainly lying; and fearing perhaps that the Pope would suspect as much, she shortly afterwards dispatched two more appeals, to Venice and Genoa respectively. She was well aware, however, that neither of these republics would ever give anything for nothing; and she knew also that her imperial treasury, drained by two civil wars in swift succession, had no funds to pay the subsidies that they would unquestionably demand. And so she took the dreadful step for which she is remembered more than for anything else: in August 1343, for the sum of 30,000 Venetian ducats, she pawned the Byzantine crown jewels to the Most Serene Republic. They were never to be redeemed; and the Empress's action somehow symbolizes, more dramatically than any other could possibly have done, the depths to which the once-great Empire of the Romans had sunk.

It did her no good. No help came - from Avignon, Genoa or Venice. Now too, as her enemy steadily consolidated his position, several of her most trusted adherents began to desert her. In 1344 John Vatatzes, one of the leading generals in Thrace, went over to Cantacuzenus; so, a month or two afterwards, did the Governor of Adrianople, Alexius's son Manuel Apocaucus, while Adrianople itself surrendered early the following year. As for Alexius himself, his own behaviour gave proof of his growing desperation. He never left his house without a numerous bodyguard; and he kept a ship, fully manned and provisioned, in the Golden Horn in case he needed to make a quick escape. All those Byzantines of whose loyalties he cherished the slightest suspicion - and they included virtually all the rich — were arrested. Part of the Great Palace of Constantine - long abandoned and in ruins - was converted into a prison in order to accommodate them.

It was here that Apocaucus met his
death. On 11 June 1345, during
one of his regular tours of inspection of the building work, a number of prisoners taking their exercise in the main courtyard suddenly noticed that, wishing apparently to have a short private conversation with one of his aides, he had separated a little from his bodyguard. Immediately they saw their opportunity. A small group of them - including, we are told, his own nephew - fell upon him. At first their only weapons were stones; then they found a heavy wooden club; finally they seized an axe from one of the workmen and struck off their victim's head, which they proudly exhibited, impaled on a spike, above the prison walls. Meanwhile the bodyguard, seeing what had happened, panicked and fled. The prisoners who had done the deed remained in the building, which they knew they could stoutly defend against any punitive expedition; but they did not actually expect anything of the kind. Had they not after all performed a public service, in ridding the Empire of a universally hated tyrant? Were they not likelier to be acclaimed as saviours, loaded with congratulations and rewards?

The course of action favoured by the Empress when she heard the news fell somewhere between the two. Her instructions to the
panbyperse
bastos
Isaac Asen were to order all the prisoners to return to their homes, with a guarantee that no measures would then be taken against them. Unfortunately, however, Asen - crushed, as John Cantacuzenus charitably explains, by the weight of his workload - failed to carry out the order; and the next morning a former member of Apocaucus's staff persuaded a party of sailors to avenge their master's death. The sailors were armed; the prisoners were not. Though some - including the murderers themselves - managed to take refuge in the
neighbouring church of the Nea
and subsequently escaped, about two hundred were massacred, many of them on the church's very threshold.