Decline & Fall - Byzantium 03 (57 page)

As it happened, however, there was at that moment another power in eastern Europe more powerful than either Venice or the Turks: Stephen Dushan, whose dominions encompassed — as well as Serbia, Macedonia and much of Bulgaria - the entire Greek
mainland as far as the Gulf of
Corinth, excepting only Attica, Boeotia and the Peloponnese. Throughout his life, Stephen had been inspired by a single dream - to rule his own Serbian Empire from the imperial throne in Constantinople. To this end he had negotiated at one time or another with every ruler in Europe who might have proved useful to him, including the Turkish Emirs and even the Pope, over whom he had dangled the usual bait of ecclesiastical union; and he might well have achieved his ambition - and even, conceivably, changed the history of Europe - had he not been stricken by sudden illness while still in his prime. He died in December 1355, aged only forty-six, having made no proper arrangements for the succession.

Immediately his Empire began to disintegrate. His son Stephen Urosh V, who had been left in charge of the old Serbian region to the north while Stephen Dushan had governed the Greek lands of 'Romania', had neither the ability nor the authority to prevent various other members of his family — and even quite humble members of his court
1
- from declaring themselves independent princes. Within a year, the 'Empire of the Serbs and Greeks' was as if it had never been. To the Byzantines it seemed an almost miraculous deliverance. In fact, however - as they well knew — they were themselves too weak to draw any positive advantage. John V made no effort to recapture the former Byzantine dominions, and although Nicephorus II, the deposed Despot of Epirus, made a determined attempt to do so he had achieved little before being killed in battle in 1358. The truth was that the death of Dushan meant nothing more than the substitution of one threat by another: for the collapse of the Serbian Empire presented the Turks with just the opportunity that they had been waiting for. No longer was there any power in Europe capable of resisting their advance.

Although John V had already been co-Emperor for fourteen years, he was still only twenty-three — and a very different person from his father-in-law. Where John Cantacuzenus had pursued a policy of unashamed appeasement with the Ottoman Turks, even going so far as to marry his daughter to the Emir Orhan, John Pal
aeologus had littl
e patience with diplomacy. He believed - righdy - that the world was not ultimatel
y large enough to contain Byzanti
nes and Turks together. It followed that the latter must be eliminated. This meant war, and war - given the

1 One of them, Vukashin, who ruled as Despot between Prilep and Lake Ochrid, had been Stephen Dushan's cupbearer; his brother John Uglcsha, Despot of Serres, had been the Tsar's
hippokomos,
or groom.

present state of the Empire - meant a grand Christian alliance against the infidel. The age of the Crusades might be over, and attempts at such alliances in more recent years had not proved conspicuously successful; but Pope Clement VI, despite his exile in Avignon, had managed to form a league against Umur of Aydin in 1344, and now that the Turks had acquired a permanent foothold in Europe the nations of the West must surely see the necessity, both political and religious, of taking decisive action while there was still time.

Just a year after his accession, on 15 December 1355, John sent envoys to Avignon bearing a letter addressed to Clement's successor, Innocent VI. It contained a long and detailed proposal, according to which the Pope would immediately dispatch to Constantinople five hundred knights, a thousand infantry, fifteen transport ships and five galleys. These would serve under the Emperor's personal command, against not only the Turks but also his own Greek enemies in the Balkans, for a period of six months. Throughout that time a papal legate would reside in the capital, where he would oversee the appointments of distinguished ecclesiastics favourable to the cause of Church union. Mass conversions would almost certainly follow, and there would be no longer any obstacle to imperial submission to the Holy See. As a further guarantee of his good faith, the Emperor would send his second son Manuel — then aged five — to Avignon; should he himself for whatever reason fail to honour his commitments to the letter, His Holiness would be free to bring up the boy as he wished, educating him in the Catholic faith and eventually marrying him to whomsoever he chose. Meanwhile Manuel's elder brother Andronicus, the heir-presumptive to the throne, would receive intensive instruction in Latin language and literature, and three Latin colleges would be founded to ensure that the sons of the imperial nobility should enjoy a similar degree of enlightenment. If by any chance the Emperor proved unable to bring about the mass conversions for which he hoped, he would at least make a personal submission himself; if on the other hand he was successful, he would request further, more ambitious assistance: nothing less than a great Christian army that would drive the Turks back into Central Asia. This too would be commanded by the Emperor, who would take the title of 'Captain-General and Standard-Bearer of the Holy Mother Church'.

This extraordinary missive reached Avignon in June 1356; Innocent VI, a sensible down-to-earth Frenchman, does not seem to have taken it too seriously. He returned a polite reply, expressing his gratification that John was willing to lead his peop
le back into the Roman fold but
making no reference to any of his detailed proposals. Clearly he expected no conversions
en bloc,
and had no intention of sending any Christian armies; what did interest him, however, was the possibility of the Emperor's own personal conversion. He therefore expressed his readiness to dispatch to him two special legates, through whose agency he looked forward to receiving John into the Holy Church as his faithful son in Christ.

These legates were both bishops. One was a Carmelite named Peter Thomas; the other was William Conti, a Dominican. They arrived in Constantinople in April 1357, and were warmly welcomed by the Emperor; but they achieved little. The assertion by Peter Thomas's hagiographer
1
that he succeeded in converting the Emperor is amply disproved by later events; in fact both bishops, seeing that the situation bore no resemblance to what John had suggested in his letter, soon gave up the struggle. Conti returned to his flock, while Peter Thomas travelled on to Cyprus, where he was subsequently appointed Apostolic Legate in the East. As for the Emperor, he was lucky to get off so lightly. Had the Pope taken his letter at its face value, sent an army as requested and then demanded the fulfilment of his promises, his position would have been difficult indeed. There was, it is true, a fairly substantial party in Constantinople that was not averse to ecclesiastical union; it included Demetrius Cydones, the distinguished scholar and translator of St Thomas Aquinas, who at about this time was actually received into the Roman Church. But the overwhelming majority of influential Byzantines, both lay and clerical, still upheld the old beliefs; indeed, Patriarch Callistus - who had resumed his office after the abdication of his enemy John VI — had recently obtained from both the Bulgarian and the Serbian Patriarchates the recognition of the supremacy of Constantinople. In such circumstances it is difficult to believe that John V could have entertained any serious hopes of ecclesiastical union; even if he did, by the summer of 1357 they must certainly have been swept away.

The story of John Palaeologus's letter to the Pope remains worth telling, however, for one reason only: as an example of the Emperor's basic unreliability, his tendency to act on a sudden impulse without any but the most cursory consideration of its possible consequences. As his father-in-law John Cantacuzenus had always known, his were not the hands into which to confide the fate of an Empire threatened on the

1 Philippe de
Mezieres, Chancellor of the French Kingdom of Cyprus,
The Life of St Peter Thomas.

outside with imminent destruction, and on the inside with disintegration and collapse.

Meanwhile, the Ottomans were spreading across Thrace. Suleyman's capture of Gallipoli in 1354 had given them the bridgehead they needed, and their advance had begun almost at once. Before long, too, those other bands of freebooting Turks who had come over in answer to appeals by John Cantacuzenus to the Emirs of Aydin or Saruchan -together with others who had arrived independently as corsairs - rallied to their standard. As early as 1359 an advance guard had reached the walls of Constantinople. Fortunately it was not large enough to constitute any immediate threat to the city; but the rest of Thrace, less well protected and exhausted by civil war, proved an easy victim. In 1361 Didymotichum fell; in 1362, Adrianople. In every city and village that was captured, a large part of the native population was transported to slavery in Asia Minor, its place being taken by Turkish colonists. That same year, 1362, saw the death of Orhan
. He was succeeded as Emir - Su
leyman having died two years before - by his son Murad, who soon proved himself a more energetic and determined leader than either his father or his elder brother, campaigning not only in Thrace but also in Bulgaria, capturing Philippopolis in 1363 and putting considerable pressure on the Bulgar Tsar John Alexander to collaborate with him against Byzantium.

When reports of their discussions reached Constantinople, John Palaeologus lost no time: with what few ships and fighting men he had available, in 1364 he personally led a punitive attack on the Bulgarian Black Sea ports and occupied Anchialus. It did him little strategic good, but was probably worth it for the psychological effect it had on his subjects. Doomed the Empire might be, but it had shown itself to be still capable of an occasional victory. On the Emperor's return his hopes were briefly raised by a report that Pope Urban V was at last making arrangements for a Crusade, to be led by the Catholic Kings Louis I of Hungary and Peter I of Cyprus, with the active and enthusiastic participation of his own cousin Count Amadeus VI of Savoy;
1
but instead of marching against the Turks this expedition eventually headed for Egypt, where in October 1365 it suffered an ignominious defeat. Once again John had to look for allies.

He had already tried Serbia - or what was left of it - sending

1 The father of Amade
us had been a half-brother of John's mother, the Empress Anne.

Patriarch Callistus as his personal envoy. The Patriarch had seen the widow of Stephen Dushan, but had unfortunately died almost immediately afterwards without having reached any substantive agreement; and the inevitable rumours of poison, though certainly unfounded, scarcely improved the atmosphere. Genoa and Venice were friendly but similarly ineffectual. Pope Urban and Peter of Cyprus had shot their bolts, and had succeeded only in making themselves look ridiculous. There remained Louis the Great, King of Hungary. He had been prudent enough to withdraw in time from the Egyptian expedition; instead -abhorring, like so many of his co-religionists, schismatics far more than infidels - he had decided to wage a holy war of his own, against not the Turks but the Christian Bulgars. In 1365 the frontier province of Vidin was occupied by a Hungarian army — an occupation which brought in its wake vast numbers of Franciscan missionaries, who immediately set about the more or less forcible conversion of the local inhabitants.

It was hardly the best background against which to conduct diplomatic negotiations. John seems to have thought, however, that Louis might still - in the right circumstances - be persuaded to help him; and he decided to go himself to Hungary. Such a step was absolutely without precedent. Emperors had frequently travelled outside their own frontiers at the head of a conquering army; but never, in all Byzantine history, had a
basileus
left his capital in the role of petitioner to the Christian West. On the other hand, John might have argued, the situation had never been so desperate. Leaving the Empire in the hands of his eldest son Andronicus, in the first bitter weeks of 1366 he sailed northward along the Black Sea coast and thence up the Danube to Buda, his two younger sons Manuel and Michael accompanying him. King Louis gave him an appropriate welcome; but he had already been in consultation with the Pope, and as soon as discussions began he made his position clear. Conversion must be the first priority. Only after Emperor and Empire had made their submission to Rome could there be any question of military assistance. This time John knew that he could make no definite commitments; even if he had, Louis would probably not have believed him. Leaving both his sons as hostages (though precisely for what is not clear)
1
he set off sadly homewards - only to find his way blocked and himself an effective prisoner of the Bulgars, who had been

1 There is no record of how long the two young princes were forced to remain in Buda; we know, however, that both were back in Constantinople in time for the negotiations on Church union which began in June 1
367.

not unnaturally alarmed at the prospect of a Byzantine-Hungarian alliance.

Once only in imperial history had an Emperor been captured by a foreign power: Romanus Diogenes, after the battle of Manzikert, almost three centuries before. Romanus, however, had been taken by his Seljuk enemies, treated with consideration and courtesy and freed after a week. John was held by his Christian neighbours, utterly ignored by the Bulgar Tsar John Alexander — who was the father-in-law of his captive's own first-born son Andronicus - and left in a small frontier town for some six months. Such treatment of the one true Emperor of the Romans, Vice-Gerent of God on earth, would have been unthinkable in former days. There could be no more forcible illustration of the depths to which the Empire had sunk. Even when John's release came at last, he owed it not to the Tsar but, surprisingly enough, to his cousin Amadeus of Savoy.