Decline & Fall - Byzantium 03 (61 page)

Somehow, one feels, they would not. Would they, on the other hand, have left the Empire in any better state? It seems improbable. By the last decade of the fourteenth century the Ottoman conquest of eastern Europe and Asia Minor had acquired a momentum that it was no longer possible to check. Of the Sultan's Christian enemies, Serbia and Bulgaria had been effectively annihilated. Only Byzantium remained; but it was a Byzantium so reduced, so impoverished, so humiliated and demoralized as to be scarcely identifiable as the glorious Empire of the Romans that it had once been. And yet, doomed as it was, it was never to give up the struggle. Three more Christian Emperors were to reign in Constantinople, all three of them men of determination and spirit. Thanks to them, it was to last another six decades — and, at the end, to go down fighting.

21

The Appeal to Europe

[1
391-1402]

Shut the gates of the city and govern within it, for everything beyond the walls is mine.

Sultan Bayezit to Manuel II

Within days of his accession, Manuel II showed his mettle. There was, he knew, a serious danger that Bayezit, as Byzantium's suzerain, might appoint his nephew John VII as
basileus;
and this was a risk that he could not possibly accept. When the news of his father's death reached him he was still a hostage of the Sultan, who had returned to his capital at Brusa. At once he began to make his plans, and on the night of 7 March 1391 he slipped out of the camp and made his way secretly to the coast, where a ship was waiting to take him across the Marmara to Constantinople.

He was welcomed in the capital with enthusiasm. For the late Emperor there was little mourning. If John V had ever enjoyed the respect of his subjects - he had certainly never known their love - that respect had long since been forfeited. Unimpressive both as a ruler and as a man, he had for the past quarter-century adopted an increasingly subservient attitude to the Sultan. In the West, he had made the Empire an object of ridicule and contempt. Worst of all, he had betrayed the Orthodox Church, of which he should have been the mainstay. To all this Manuel II presented a refreshing contrast. Now in the prime of life - at the time of his accession he was not quite forty-one — in appearance he was every inch an Emperor: Bayezit himself had once observed that his imperial blood was recognizable from his bearing alone, even to those seeing him for the first time. He enjoyed perfect health and possessed apparently boundless energy; in short, he seemed to be far less the offspring of his father than of his grandfather. Though not, alas, a chronicler like John Cantacuzenus - would that he had been, since our sources for this desperate period of Byzantine history are once again lamentably few - he

shared with him both a deep love of literature and the traditional Byzantine passion for theology; Demetrius Cydones regularly hails him in his letters as 'the philosopher Emperor'. Nothing gave him greater pleasure than the composition of essays and dissertations on matters of Christian doctrine, the more abstruse the better. He remained, however, a man of action. Twice, in 1371 and again in 1390, he had come to the rescue of his increasingly incapable father, on both occasions with complete success. In happier times he might have been a great ruler.

But the existing situation left little scope for greatness. The Emperor was now but a weak and virtually helpless vassal of the Ottoman Sultan; and the Sultan, who would probably have preferred to see the far more amenable John VII on the throne of Constantinople, had been outraged by the quiet deliberation with which Manuel had assumed it without his authority. His reaction was to inflict two more humiliations on the hapless Byzantines. The first was to set aside a whole area of the city for Turkish merchants, who would be no longer subject to imperial law but whose affairs would be regulated by a
qadi,
or judge, appointed by himself. The second - in May 1391, only two months after Manuel's accession as sole Emperor - was to summon him once again to Anatolia to take part in yet another of his campaigns, this time to the Black Sea coast - a feudal obligation distasteful enough in itself, but made considerably more so by the company of John VII (to whom he could still hardly bring himself to speak) and by the sadness and devastation of the country through which they marched. He wrote to his friend Cydones:

The plain [where we are encamped] is deserted, as a result of the flight of its inhabitants to the woods and the caves and the mountain-tops as they tried to flee from what they are unable to escape: a slaughter that is inhuman and savage and without any formality of justice. No one is spared - neither women nor children, nor the sick, nor the aged . . .

There are many cities in these regions, but they lack the one thing without which they can never be true cities; they have no people
...
And when I ask the names of the cities, the answer is always 'we have destroyed these places and time has destroyed their names'. . .

What is indeed unbearable for me is that I am fighting beside these people when to add to their strength is to diminish our own.'

1 The letters are quoted at length by J. W. Barker (op. cit., pp.
88-96).
The translations are basically his, but shortened and simplified in order to spare the reader the infuriating convolutions of Manuel's literary style.

The Emperor was back in Constantinople by the middle of January 1392, and on Saturday, 10 February he took to himself a bride. She was Helena, daughter of Constantine Dragash, the Serbian Prince of Serres — like himself, a vassal of the Sultan. The marriage was followed the next day by a joint coronation. For Manuel this was not strictly necessary - he had already been crowned nineteen years before - but he believed with good reason that such a ceremony, performed with the full Orthodox ritual and as much pomp and display as could be managed, would provide the best possible tonic to his subjects' morale. It would remind them, too, of what Byzandum stood for: of that astonishing continuity with which Emperor had succeeded Emperor without a break - even though occasionally in exile - for thirteen centuries since the days of ancient Rome; of the fact that, whatever dangers he himself might be facing, whatever occasional indignities he might be called upon to suffer, he remained supreme among the princes of Christendom, Equal of the Apostles, God's own anointed Vice-Gerent on earth.

This was the message that went out to the vast congregation on that cold February day in St Sophia, as Patriarch Antonius slowly lowered the imperial diadem on to the head of the
basileus
and Manuel himself then crowned his consort in her turn. At that moment, as the mosaics glinted gold in the candlelight, the clouds of incense curled up to the spreading dome above and the coronation anthem echoed through the Great Church, it hardly seemed to matter that the true regalia were still in pawn to the Venedans; or that the Emperor whose semi-divinity was being so loftily extolled had in fact returned only a month before from a campaign on behalf of the infidel Sultan; or that that Sultan, already the master of nearly all eastern Europe, was even now at the gates of the capital. Such ignoble considerations certainly did not
occur to the Archimandrite Ignati
us of Smolensk, who has left an ecstatic account of the proceedings he was fortunate enough to witness; still less do they appear to have troubled the anonymous Byzantine eye-witness who describes with almost equal enthusiasm the solemn state with which the newly-crowned pair returned to the palace, their horses' bridles held by the caesars, despots and
sebastocrators,
before showing themselves enthroned to their cheering subjects.

For a year and a half after his coronation Manuel was left in comparative peace; but in July 1393 a serious insurrection in Bulgaria against the Sultan brought swift retribudon, and the following winter Bayezit called his principal Christian vassals to his camp at Serres. Apart from the

Emperor himself, they included his brother Theodore, Despot of the Morea, his father-in-law Constantine Dragash, his nephew John VII and the Serbian Stephen Lazarevich. None of them knew, however, that the others had been summoned also: only when they were all assembled did they realize how completely they had put themselves in the Sultan's power. Manuel himself was convinced that a general massacre had been intended, and that Bayezit had countermanded his own orders only after the eunuch entrusted with the executions — who may well have been Ali Pasha, the son of Khaireddin, conqueror of Thessalonica - had refused or somehow prevaricated. Here, in short, was yet another example of his suzerain's mercurial changes of mood, when he would instantaneously switch from blind and savage fury to displays of almost exaggerated kindness and courtesy:

First he showed his anger by the outrages he committed against our followers, gouging out their eyes and cutting off their hands . . . and when in this fashion he had assuaged his unreasonable spirit, thereafter he very simple-mindedly attempted to make his peace with me - whom he was injuring and had dishonoured with myriad injustices - greeting me with gifts and then sending me home, just as children who weep after being punished are soothed with sweetmeats.

What better proof was there that the Sultan was by now emotionally unstable, and consequently more dangerous than ever? Eventually, after giving his vassals further grim warnings of the consequences of any future disobedience, he let them go — apart from Theodore, who was obliged to accompany him on campaign to Thessaly and was there put under severe pressure to yield Monemvasia, Argos and several other fortresses in the Peloponnese. The luckless Despot undertook to comply; fortunately, however, he escaped soon afterwards to his own territory, where he immediately rescinded his promises. Manuel meanwhile, still shaken by what he believed till the end of his life to have been a narrow escape from death, returned with all speed to Constantinople.

Soon afterwards he received yet another summons from Bayezit. This time he flatly refused. His experience at Serres had driven him to an inescapable conclusion: the days of appeasement were over. Such a policy might have succeeded with Murad - who, despite occasional bouts of savagery, had been an essentially reasonable man with whom civilized discussions were possible. Bayezit, on the other hand, had shown himself to be unbalanced and
deeply untrustworthy. Manuel's
first instincts had been right after all. The sole chance of survival was in resistance. Meanwhile, however, he had no delusions as to the momentousness of the decision he had taken. His refusal of the Sultan's summons would be interpreted as an act of open defiance, a casting-off of his former vassalage - in effect, a declaration of war.

One consideration only enabled him to contemplate such a step: however determined Bayezit might be to annihilate him, however great the Turkish army or formidable their siege engines, he still believed in the impregnability of Constantinople. On both occasions that the city had fallen to armed force - in 1203 and again in 1204, during the Fourth Crusade - the attacks had been launched from the sea, against the relatively inferior fortifications which ran along the shore of the Golden Horn. Such an operation would be impossible for Bayezit, who was still without an effective navy. He could attack only by land, from the west, and despite the recent demolition of the fortress by the Golden Gate the Land Walls were as strong as ever they had been. They had stood for almost a thousand years; the Byzantines had long since lost count of the number of would-be conquerors who had turned away from them, furious and frustrated at their own impotence and often without loosing a single arrow.

Manuel was soon able to put his theory to the test. In the spring of 1394 an immense Turkish army marched against Constantinople, and by the beginning of autumn the siege had begun in earnest. The Sultan had ordered a complete blockade, and although an occasional vessel managed to run the gauntlet — notably a Venetian merchantman which arrived early in 1395 with a much-needed shipment of grain — for some time essential supplies ran desperately short. All the land outside the walls -anyway inaccessible to the inhabitants — had been laid waste; the only areas available for cultivation were the plots and gardens within the city itself. Many a cottage was demolished for the sake of the resulting firewood, so that the bakers could bake their bread. Fortunately for the citizens, however, the situation gradually eased. The blockade was not lifted - it was to continue in one form or another for eight years, during which spasmodic attacks continued to be made on the walls - but gradually, as the ever-unpredictable Bayezit lost interest in the siege and involved himself in other operations that offered more immediate rewards, the pressure in some degree relaxed. At last Manuel was able to devote some of his time to diplomacy — for, he was well aware, without foreign alliances his Empire could have no long-term prospects of survival.

John VI had not been the only
basileus
in the past century to have discovered, to his cost, just how difficult it was to persuade the princes of the West of what should have been a self-evident truth: that the dangers now faced by Byzantium constituted an almost equal threat to themselves. In the last decade of the fourteenth century, however, the advances of the Turks across the Balkans had begun to cause them genuine anxiety. Bulgaria finally fell with the capture of its capital, Trnovo, in July 1393; so, over the next two years, did Thessaly. Further south, in Attica and the Morea, the already confused situation had been still further complicated by the irruption, some twenty years before, of a company of adventurers from Navarre. They had made themselves sworn enemies of the Despot Theodore, as well as of the Acciajuoli family who had recently captured Athens from the Catalans; before long the whole area was up in arms, and the veteran Turkish general Evrenos-Beg saw his chance. Defeating Theodore below the walls of Corinth, with the enthusiastic help of the Navarrese he smashed his way into the Morea and seized two Byzantine fortresses in the very heart of the Despotate. Then on 17 May 1395 Prince Mircea the Elder of Wallachia, supported by Louis the Great's son-in-law King Sigismund of Hungary, did battle against the Turks at Rovine. Several Serbian princes fought as vassals on the side of the Sultan, among them Stephen Lazarevich, the legendary hero Marko Kralyevich and Manuel's own father-in-law, Constantine Dragash; and though the struggle was inconclusive it resulted in Mircea's being obliged in his turn to accept Turkish suzerainty.