Decline & Fall - Byzantium 03 (60 page)
On all other fronts, that Empire was disintegrating fast. From his base at Thessalonica Manuel Palaeologus, still in pursuit of his dream of re
-
establishing Byzantine authority over Macedonia and Thessaly, was fighting a determined rearguard action, and in the summer and autumn of 1383 scored several encouraging victories against the invaders - so encouraging indeed as to cause his terrified father serious embarrassment in his diplomatic dealings with the Sultan. But such triumphs were of little real value against the Ottoman flood. Advancing up the Vardar river, a formidable force of Turks - swelled now by many regiments from the conquered Christian lands - had already captured Ochrid and Prilep in 1380 before pushing north-west into Albania. Further to the east, another of Murad's armies overran Bulgaria, taking Sardica in 1385 and advancing in the following year as far as Nish. In 1386 the monasteries of Mount Athos also made their joint submission to the Sultan. There remained only Thessalonica, and Thessalonica itself was now in grave danger. Serres, a mere seventy miles away, had fallen in September 1383, and as soon as its conquerors had had enough of the rapine and plunder that followed their conquest it was inevitable that they should have turned their attention to the last great Christian city that stood between themselves and Constantinople. In mid-October the Turkish general Khaireddin - 'Torch of the Faith' - who was also the Sultan's Grand Vizier, issued an ultimatum to the Thessalonians: surrender or massacre. Manuel Palaeologus acted at once. Summoning his subjects to an assembly in the main square he exhorted them, in a long and moving speech, to resist the infidel with all the strength at their command; then he began work on the defences.
Thessalonica had survived so long only because Murad's lack of naval power had made it impossible for him to set up an effective blockade. Nothing, therefore, would have been easier for the princes of Christian Europe than to have sent the beleaguered city reinforcements and
1 It was there that he was to die, aged seventy-eight, on
15
June 1383.
supplies by sea. Had they done so it could have survived almost indefinitely, and Manuel and Theodore together might even have united northern Greece and saved it from the Sultan. But no help came, and as the months went by the Emperor saw that he was gradually losing the support of his own people, more and more of whom began openly advocating surrender. Despite this widespread defeatism he managed to hold out for three and a half years; but with the coming of spring in
13
87 the general morale had sunk to the point where it was plain that continued resistance was impossible. He himself however still refused to submit; and on 6 April, cursing the Thessalonians for their fecklessness and pusillanimity, he sailed away to Lesbos and left them to their fate. Three days later they opened the gates, thereby escaping the bloodshed and pillage which they would inevitably have suffered had they fought on to the end.
The three years that followed the fall of Thessalonica were perhaps the saddest of Manuel's life. His great campaign had failed; he had been betrayed by his Thessalonian subjects; his father's policy of appeasement had been proved right. A further humiliation awaited him at Lesbos, where Francesco Gattilusio refused to allow him entrance to the city of Mitylene and he and his followers were obliged to pitch their camp in the fields, under the scorching summer sun. From there he moved on to another scarcely more hospitable island - probably Tenedos - and thence, at the instigation of a Turkish embassy sent specially to him with messages of friendship, to the Ottoman court at Brusa. His first encounter with the Sultan since the failure of his campaign in Serbia and Macedonia and the loss of Thessalonica must have been painful indeed, marking as it did his own admission of defeat and the end of all his hopes for a successful Christian counter-offensive in the Balkans. But Murad gave him a warm welcome and showed him every courtesy, pressing him insistently to return to Constantinople and make his peace with his father.
Now that Manuel had given up the struggle, there was indeed no reason why the two Emperors should not settle their differences; but John V - whose only aim was to keep the Sultan well-disposed towards Byzantium in general and himself in particular - had been badly frightened by his son's disobedience and was determined that he must do some sort of penance before there could be any formal reconciliation. He therefore banished Manuel to the island of Lemnos; and Manuel - who was exhausted, deeply demoralized and anyway had nowhere else to go - seems to have accepted the sentence without complaint.
*
Manuel Palaeologus was still in exile on Lemnos when, in the summer of 1389, the Serbs made their last heroic attempt to shake off the Ottoman yoke. After the disaster on the Maritsa it had seemed impossible that they should ever fight as a nadon again; and yet, weakened and divided as they now were, with the glorious if short-lived Empire of Stephen Dushan no more than a distant memory, a league of Serbian boyars gathered together under the leadership
of a certain Prince Lazar Hrebe
lianovich, who had seized control of northern Serbia after the death of Stephen Urosh V in 1371, to resist the Turkish advance. It included Vuk Brankovich, ruler of the southern district of Kosovo, a
nd was later also joined by Tvrr
ko, Prince of Bosnia. Between 1386 and 1388, after the Sultan had been obliged to return to Anatolia, this league had proved remarkably successful, defeating the Turks in a number of skirmishes and even in one or two pitched battles. But in 1389 Murad was back in the Balkans, with several new regiments brought with him from Asia; and in the early summer he advanced on the plain of Kosovo, 'the field of blackbirds'.
The battle that followed on 15 June has entered Serbian folklore, and has inspired, in The Kosovo Cycle, one of the greatest of all medieval epics; Tsar Lazar - as he is always known - has joined Marko Kralyevich as a hero of national legend. The true story, however, in so far as it can be disentangled from that legend, is not particularly edifying. Serbian morale was low. The princes were in disagreement among themselves, and treason was widely hinted at: Lazar himself, in a speech on the eve of the battle, openly accused his own son-in-law, Milosh Obravich, of working for the enemy. Murad, on the other hand, though he spent much of the night in prayer, was so confident of victory that he had ordered that all castles, towns and villages in the region should be spared; the castles he would need later, and he had no wish to antagonize his future subjects unnecessarily.
Next morning, the Sultan drew up his army in its usual order. He himself commanded the centre, with his crack regiment of Janissaries and his personal guard of cavalry; on the right was his elder son Bayezit with the European troops, on the left his younger son Yakub with the regiments from Asia. To begin with, fortune was against them. Ignoring an initial advance by two thousand Turkish archers, the Serbian cavalry launched a massive charge that broke through the Turkish left flank. But Bayezit immediately swung round and urged his men at full gallop to the rescue, laying about him to left and right with his heavy iron mace. After this counter-attack, the Turks gradually gained the upper hand - though it was only after Vuk Brankovich fled the field towards the end of the day, taking with him twelve thousand of his men, that the surviving Serbs finally broke up in disorder and fled.
Whether or not Brankovich's treachery was the result of a secret compact with the Sultan will never be known; if there was one, Murad never lived to reveal it. Just how he met his death is also uncertain; it seems, however, to have been the work of Milosh Obravich, furious at the aspersions which had been publicly cast upon him by his father-in-law and determined to prove his loyalty. According to the most probable version of the story, he pretended to desert to the enemy and was brought before Murad; he made his formal obeisance and then, before the guard could prevent him, plunged a long dagger twice into the Sultan's breast — with such force, we are told, that the blade emerged at the back. He was immediately set upon and dispatched in his turn, but the deed was done. Murad's last act was to summon Lazar - who had been taken prisoner at an earlier stage in the battle - and condemn him to execution.
The report of the Sultan's murder spread to the West, where the battle was co
nsequentl
y at first thought to have ended in a major victory for Christendom; in Paris, a week or two later, King Charles VI went so far as to order a service of thanksgiving in Notre-Dame. Gradually, however, as more reports filtered through, the tragic truth became known. The Turks, under the brilliant leadership of their new Sultan, had carried the day; the Serbian army had been utterly destroyed. Of the few Serbian nobles who survived - they included Lazar's son Stephen Lazarevich - each was obliged to swear a personal oath of fealty to Bayezit. But the Serbian nation, even in its fragmented form, was no more. It was to be over four hundred years before it arose again.
Had Tsar Lazar and his fellow-boyars been able to unite seven years earlier, had they appealed to Manuel Palaeologus for assistance and had Manuel decided to throw in everything he had on one last heroic bid to stop the infidel once and for all, might the battle of Kosovo have ended differently? It is possible, but unlikely - and unlikelier still that even a victory for Christendom at that time and that place would have had any lasting effect on the future of the Balkan peninsula. In a year or two at the most the Turks would have been back, better armed, better provisioned and in greater numbers than before. Their manpower was virtually limitless: new regiments could be summoned from Anatolia in a matter of weeks, and even in Europe
there were plenty of Christian
mercenaries ready and willing to march against their co-religionists for good pay and a chance of plunder. The harsh truth was that, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the Ottoman armies were virtually unconquerable by anything less than a concerted European Crusade; and that such a Crusade, though frequently proposed and discussed, was never to come into being. Against so formidable a force, the Christian East had no hope; we can only wonder that it lasted as long as it did.
Bayezit's very first action, after his proclamation as Sultan on the field of Kosovo, had been to order the death of his brother and fellow-commander Yakub. Sentence was immediately carried out; the young Prince was garrotted with a bowstring. He had shown great courage in the battle and was much loved by his men, but for Bayezit these qualities only increased the likelihood of his one day stirring up sedition. Thus was instituted the terrible tradition of imperial fratricide - to be codified into law by Bayezit's great-grandson Mehmet II - which for the next three centuries was indelibly to stain the history of the Ottoman ruling house.
1
The Sultan had started as he meant to go on. A man of almost superhuman energy, impetuous and unpredictable, as quick in taking decisions as he was in implementing them and utterly merciless to all who stood in his way, it was not for nothing that he was known by his subjects as
Yildirim,
the Thunderbolt. During his thirteen-year reign he was to prove himself an astute diplomat, as his father had been before him; but for Bayezit, unlike Murad, diplomacy had little instinctive appeal. He thought in terms of conquest, and of Empire. The simple title of Sultan was not enough; he now styled himself Sultan of Rum, the ancient formula that had been adopted by the Seljuk emirs three hundred years before to assert their dominion over 'Roman' Anatolia. To Bayezit however 'Rum' signified something more than it had to Alp Arslan and his successors. No longer did it mean simply the former Byzantine territories in Asia Minor; it now included the Second Rome itself - the city of Constantinople.
And - fortunately for the new Sultan - Constantinople was still torn between rival factions within the imperial family. The senior Emperor John V was still reigning from the Palace of Blachernae, and the
1 To gi
ve but one example: Sultan Mehme
t III, on his accession in 1595, had no fewer than nineteen of his brothers strangled, together with six pregnant slaves, their favourites from the harem. (Later he also killed his mother and his son, but that was not part of the tradition.)
unspeakable Andronicus IV was in his grave; but Andronicus's detestation of his father was fully shared by his own son John VII - who, having been careful to maintain the dynastic claims he had inherited, was at the time of the Kosovo battle actually in Genoa drumming up support for another insurrection. Returning shortly afterwards to the capital, he found messengers awaiting him from Bayezit; and on the night of 13 April 1390, with the aid of a small force put at his disposal by the Sultan, he succeeded in ove
rturning John V for the second ti
me, making his triumphal entry into the city the following morning. Once again the Emperor - together with Manuel, whom he had summoned back from Lemnos just a fortnight before, and a number of loyal followers - barricaded himself into the fortress of the Golden Gate
1
and, in an unwonted display of courage, settled down to withstand a siege.
Manuel, however, slipped away to seek assistance. His first two attempts to rescue his father were unsuccessful, but on 25 August he appeared with
two galleys lent by the Knights
of St John from their base in Rhodes, one each from Lemnos, Christopolis and (somewhat surprisingly) Constantinople, and four other smaller vessels of unknown provenance. Fortunately the Golden Gate stronghold was only a few yards from the Marmara, and possessed its own harbour into which the little fleet had no difficulty in forcing its way. Fighting continued for the next three weeks, but on Saturday, 17 September the old Emperor and his men made a sudden sally, taking his grandson completely off his guard and driving him out of the city.
Fully reconciled at last, John and Manuel returned triumphantly to the Palace of Blachernae. There was, however, a price to be paid for their success. The Sultan, away in Anatolia, looked upon the failure of his attempt to install John VII on the throne as not so much a political reverse as a personal insult. Furious, he demanded that Manuel should immediately join him on campaign, bringing with him all the tribute that was by now owing. A similar summons was sent to John VII, with whom he was almost as angry. In the circumstances the two men, despite their mutual detestation, could only obey; nor, that same autumn, could they refuse the Sultan's orders to take part in the siege of Philadelphia. And so it was that not one but two Emperors of the Romans found themselves directly instrumental in enforcing the
1 This probably formed the nucleus of the Fortress of the Seven Towers (Yedikule),
which was much enlarged by Mehme II
after the conquest of the city and of which the ruins still stand today.
capitulation of the last surviving Byzantine stronghold in Asia Minor.
1
Of all the many humiliations inflicted on the dying Empire, this was surely the most ironical.
Soon afterwards Bayezit sent John V another still more peremptory ultimatum. The fortress of the Golden Gate - which, in the previous year, had saved his crown if not his life - was to be demolished. Failure to obey would result in the immediate imprisonment and blinding of Manuel, who was still being held at the Sultan's camp. Once again the poor Emperor had no choice but to comply; it was, however, the last indignity that he was called upon to suffer. With the coming of winter he retired to his private apartments, where he took to his bed and turned his face to the wall. He died on 16 February 1391, aged fifty-eight.
He had reigned as
basileus
- if we date that reign from his coronation in November 1341 - just a few months short of half a century, the longest reign of any Emperor in the eleven-hundred-year history of Byzantium. Even if we consider it to have begun only after the abdication of John Cantacuzenus in 1354, it had lasted nearly thirty-seven years, a period matched by Alexius I and Manuel I Comnenus but exceeded only by his great-grandfather Andronicus II
and by Constantine VII Porphyro
genitus in the tenth century. It was, by any standards, too long. At one of the most desperate moments of its history, the Empire was governed by a ruler who was neither intelligent nor far-sighted, and who possessed virtually none of those qualities necessary to a successful statesman. Already as early as 1355, when he had made his extraordinary proposals to Pope Innocent, he had shown a barely credible lack of political understanding; thereafter, again and again, we find him giving way to the sudden impulse, almost always with disastrous results. Would any of his predecessors, one wonders, have decided to embark on a vitally important diplomatic mission to Hungary - involving a long and arduous journey in mid-winter - without taking any advance soundings as to how he would be received or what were his chances of success? Would any but he have sailed so impetuously off to Venice, fully aware that he was heavily in debt to the Republic but apparently oblivious of the fact that if the negotiations failed he would not even have enough money to return home? Did any other have to be rescued on four separate occasions - once on the Bulgarian border, once in Venice and twice in his own capital of Constantinople? Such humiliations as these,
1 See p. 339. Had John V and Manuel retracted their promise of 1378? Or had the people of Philadelphia simply refused to submit to the Sultan? We shall never know.
largely self-inflicted as they were, brought John not so much pity as ridicule - and did his reputation far more harm in the eyes of Western Europe than those which he suffered at the hands of the Ottoman Sultan.
John V's passive obedience to his Turkish suzerains forms a dramatic contrast, too, to the aggressive policies of his early years. By the end, admittedly, he was powerless: unable even to protest against the treatment accorded to him, far less to resist it. And yet — the issue cannot be altogether avoided — did his record have to be quite so unedifying? Could he not have sent a regiment or two to support those gallant Serbs who fought, so bravely and against such odds, at the Maritsa and on the plains of Kosovo? Of course not, he might have replied, and anyway look what happened to them; was this really the time for suicidal heroics? And was he not in any case the sworn vassal of the Sultan? The argument is unanswerable, but the questions persist: how would Basil the Macedonian have dealt with the situation, or his namesake the Bulgar-Slayer? What would Alexius Comnenus have done in similar circumstances, or his son John II, or even Michael Palaeologus? Would they all have been as craven as John V?
