Decline & Fall - Byzantium 03 (72 page)

Constantine was able to spend most of the two years following the Turkish invasion doing his best to repair the damage it had caused; the Sultan, on the other hand, was still bent on extending his Empire. In the summer of
1448
he turned his attention to John Hunyadi, now Regent of Hungary. Hunyadi was ready for him. He had already gathered an army of Hungarians, Wallachians and assorted mercenaries, and marched south in the expectation of joining forces with the Albanian Scanderbeg. But Scanderbeg was fully occupied with the Venetians; and Hunyadi was without an ally when, on
17
October, he faced the Sultan on that same plain of Kosovo that had seen the destruction of the Serbian nation less than sixty years before. For three long days the battle raged; but by the
20th
the Hungarians could fight no longer. John Hunyadi escaped, but was almost immediately captured by his former ally George Brankovich - now a faithful vassal of the Sultan - who held him until he had agreed to pay compensation for damage caused by his army in Serbia.

Eleven days later, on
31
October
1448,
John VIII died in Constantinople. Though he was still only fifty-six, the disappointments of the past few years had aged him prematurely and left him a sad and broken man. After Varna and Kosovo there could be no more Crusades; few people anywhere in Europe now believed that the Empire could be saved from the infidel, and there were by now a good many, at least in the Latin world, who seriously doubted whether it was worth saving. Of all the Byzantine Emperors John is the best known in appearance, thanks to his portrait in the famous fresco of the Magi by Benozzo Gozzoli that adorns the chapel of the Palazzo Medici-Riccardi in Florence.
1
But he hardly merited his posthumous celebrity. Manuel II had remarked on his deathbed that the Empire needed not a great
basileus
but a good manager; it has been rightly observed
2
that John was neither.

1
See cover illustration.

2
By Professor Nicol, op. cit., p.
386.

He possessed neither the ability of his father nor the charismatic qualities of his brother. Much of his reign was spent, in defiance of Manuel's wise advice, in the pursuance of a policy which could never conceivably have succeeded; as a result he sacrificed his Church's independence, forfeited his own popularity and ultimately brought about only a miserable campaign that did far more harm than good.

Yet we must not be too hard on John VIII. He did his best, and worked diligently for what he believed to be right. Besides, the situation that he inherited was already past all hope; in such circumstances, virtually anything that he had attempted would have been doomed to failure. And perhaps it was just as well. Byzantium, devoured from within, threatened from without, scarcely capable any longer of independent action, reduced now to an almost invisible dot on the map of Europe, needed — more, probably, than any once-great nation has ever needed - the
coup de grace.
It had been a long time coming. Now, finally, it was at hand.

24

The Fall

[1448-53]

Have ye heard of a city of which one side is land and the two others sea? The Hour of Judgement shall not sound until seventy thousand sons of Isaac shall capture it.

The Prophet Mohammed, according to ancient Islamic tradition

John VIII Palaeologus had died childless. His first wife had succumbed to the plague at the age of fifteen; his second he had refused even to look at; his third he had dearly loved, but she too had failed to present him with an heir. Admittedly he had five brothers - too many, as it turned out, since they were endlessly squabbling among themselves and he had proved totally incapable of keeping them in order - of whom the first, Theodore, had predeceased him by four months and the second, Andronicus, had died young in Thessalonica. Of the three survivors -
Constantine, Demetrius and Thomas — John had formally nominated Constantine as his heir; but Demetrius, who was consumed by ambition and had already made one unsuccessful bid for the throne after his brother's return from Florence six years before, immediately hurried from Selymbria to Constantinople to claim the succession. As self-proclaimed leader of the anti-unionists - and recognized as such by George Scholarius - he enjoyed a certain popularity in the capital and might well have achieved his objective had it not been for his mother, the Empress Helena; but she at once declared Constantine the rightful Emperor, simultaneously asserting her right to act as Regent until he should arrive from the Morea. Thomas, the youngest of the br
others, who had reached Constanti
nople in mid-November, gave her his full support; and Demetrius, seeing that he was beaten, finally did likewise. Early in December the Empress sent George Sphrantzes to the Sultan's court to obtain his approval for the new
basileus.

Meanwhile two envoys had sail
ed for the Morea with powers to
invest Constantine as Emperor. Clearly they could not perform a coronation, nor was there any Patriarch at Mistra; the ceremony which was held there on 6 January
1449
was
almost certainly a purely civil one, consisting of a public acclamation followed by a simple investiture. Such a procedure had at least one perfectly valid historical precedent: Manuel Comnenus had been similarly invested by his father John II in the wilds of Cilicia. But on that occasion, and even when - as with John Cantacuzenus in
1341
- a coronation had taken place outside the capital, it had been thought proper to have the Emperor crowned by the Patriarch of Constantinople in St Sophia as soon as this was practicable. With Constantine XI Dragases - he always preferred to use this Greek form of his Serbian mother's name - no such full ecclesiastical coronation ever occurred. How could it have? The Orthodox Church, since the Council of Florence, was in schism. The Patriarch Gregory III, a fervent unionist, was not recognized - and was indeed execrated as a traitor - by well over half his flock. Constantine himself, though he played down the issue as much as he could, had never condemned the union; if by upholding it he could increase even infinitesimally the chances of Western aid it was, he felt, his duty to do so. But the price was high. The anti-unionists, who continued vehemently to proclaim the folly of seeking salvation from Western heretics rather than from the Almighty, refused to pray for him in their churches. Without a coronation in St Sophia he had no moral claim on their loyalties, or on those of any of his subjects; yet any such coronation would have caused widespread riots and might even have triggered off a full-scale civil war.

When Constantine Dragases first set foot as Emperor in his capital on
12
March
1449
- it is a sad reflection on the state of the Empire that he had been obliged to travel from Greece in a Venetian ship, there being no Byzantine vessels available - this whole impossible situation was immediately clear to him; yet Pope Nicholas V, who had succeeded Eugenius in
1447,
was either unwilling or unable to accept it. Ever since ecclesiastical union had first been mooted, the Papacy had insistently refused to see the difficulties involved on the Byzantine side; and Nicholas was no less blind than his predecessors. When in April
1451,
in yet another attempt to convince him, Constantine sent to Rome a long and detailed statement by the anti-unionist leaders, he only urged the Emperor to be firm with his opponents: if they spoke against the union or showed any disrespect for the Church of Rome of which they were now members they must be properly punished. Meanwhile, he continued, Patriarch Gregory - who had resigned in despair a short time before must be reinstated; and the decree of the Council of Florence must be properly proclaimed in St Sophia and celebrated with a Mass of Thanksgiving. In May
1452
he finally lost patience and dispatched Cardinal Isidore of Kiev as Apostolic Legate to settle the matter once and for all.

The Emperor, meanwhile, had had other problems to consider, among the most pressing of which was that of the succession. He was now in his middle forties, and twice widowed. Both his marriages had been happy, but neither had proved fruitful. His first wife, Maddalena Tocco, had died in November
1429,
after little more than a year of marriage; his second, Caterina Gattilusio - daughter of the Genoese lord of Lesbos -whom he had married in
1441,
had survived for only a few months before dying at Palaiokastro on Lemnos, where she and Constantine together had been temporarily cut off by a Turkish fleet. Clearly he must now find a third. Various possibilities were explored. In the West there was a Portuguese princess, who happened also to be the niece of King Alfonso of Aragon and Naples; Isabella Orsini, daughter of the Prince of Taranto, was also considered. In the East, it seemed that either the ruling family of Trebizond or that of Georgia might be able to furnish a suitable bride. The Emperor's old friend George Sphrantzes was accordingly sent off to these last two courts to take diplomatic soundings.

It was while Sphrantzes was in Trebizond, in February
1451,
that he heard of the death of Murad II. Immediately, a new idea came to him. The Sultan's widow Maria - in Turkish, Mara - was the daughter of old George Brankovich; although she and Murad had been married for fifteen years she had borne him no children, and it was generally believed that the marriage had never been consummated. She was, however, the stepmother of her husband's son and successor, the nineteen-year-old Mehmet, who was known to be energetic and ambitious and a sworn foe of Byzantium. If she were now to become its Empress, what better way could there be of keeping the boy under proper control? When the idea was put to the Emperor he was distincdy intrigued. The Palaeologi were already connected with the house of Brankovich, Constantine's niece Helena - daughter of his brother Thomas - having married Maria's brother Lazar. An ambassador at once sped off to Serbia to consult the parents of the intended bride. George and his wife were delighted, and readily gave their consent; the only opposition came from Maria herself, but her refusal was absolute. Years before, she explained, she had sworn an oath that if ever she escaped from the infidel she would devote the rest of her life to celibacy, chastity and charitable works. No amount
of argument would induce her to
change her mind - and subsequent events, it must be admitted, were fully to justify her decision. Poor Sphrantzes was sent back to Georgia to continue negotiations there, and these were soon successfully completed; but the proposed marriage never took place, and Constantine was to remain single for the rest of his short life.

Surprisingly little was known in Constantinople - and even less among the Christian peoples of the West - about the inscrutable young prince who had recently succeeded to the Ottoman throne at Adrianople. Born in
1433,
Mehmet was the third of Murad's sons. He had had an unhappy childhood. His father had made no secret of his preference for his two elder half-brothers Ahmet and Ali, both children of well-born mothers, whereas Mehmet's own mother had been merely a slave-girl in the harem, and probably (though we cannot be sure) a Christian to boot. At the age of two he had been taken to Amasa, a province of northern Anatolia of which his fourteen-year-old brother was Governor; but Ahmet had died only four years later and the six-year-old Mehmet had succeeded him. Then, in
1444,
Ali had been found strangled in his bed, in circumstances still mysterious. Mehmet, now heir to the throne, was summoned back urgently to Adrianople. Hitherto his education had been largely neglected; suddenly he found himself in the care of the greatest scholars that could be found and with them, over the next few years, laid the foundations of the learning and culture for which he was soon to be famous. At the time of his accession he is said to have been fluent not only in his native Turkish but in Arabic, Greek, Latin, Persian and Hebrew.

Twice, in the last six years of his life, Sultan Murad had abdicated the throne in favour of his son; twice his Grand Vizier Halil Pasha had prevailed upon him to resume the reins of government. Young Mehmet, he reported, was arrogant and self-willed, ever bent on going his own way and apparently determined to ignore the Vizier's advice. On one occasion he had adopted the cause of a fanatical Persian dervish, and had been enraged when the fellow was finally apprehended and burnt at the stake; on another he had ignored dangerous disturbances on the Greek and Albanian frontiers in favour of some crack-brained scheme to attack Constantinople. After Murad's second reluctant return to power he gave up all thoughts of retirement and settled down once again in Adrianople, banishing his unsatisfactory son to Magnesia in Anatolia; and it was there that news was brought to Mehmet that his father had died, on
13
February
1451,
of an apoplectic seizure.

It took the new Sultan just five days to travel from Magnesia to Adrianople, where he held a formal reception at which he confirmed his father's ministers in their places or, in certain cases, appointed them elsewhere. In the course of these ceremonies Murad's widow arrived to congratulate him on his succession. Mehmet received her warmly and engaged her for some time in conversation; when she returned to the harem she found that her infant son had been murdered in his bath. The young Sultan, it seemed, was not one to take chances.