MURAD
THE OSMANLIS LAY THE FOUNDATIONS OF AN EMPIRE IN EUROPE
The use of Ottoman mercenaries in the Byzantine civil wars was fatal to
the Empire. From the very fact that they were Osmanlis and mercenaries,
the auxiliaries of Cantacuzenos were dangerous allies for a man who
claimed to be fighting for his fatherland. The fertile valleys which
Bulgarian and Serbian had so long disputed with Greek fired the
imagination of these ambitious adventurers. The conquest of Macedonia
and Thrace seemed to them as feasible as it was worth while. For they
had a revelation of the weakness of the Balkan peoples that could have
come to them in no other way. It was as if Cantacuzenos had said to
Orkhan and his followers: Here is our country. You see how rich it is.
You see how we hate each other, race striving with race, faction with
faction. We have no patriotism. We have no rulers or leaders actuated by
other than purely selfish motives. Our religion means no more to us than
does our fatherland. Here are our military roads. We give you the
opportunity of becoming acquainted with the easiest routes, of learning
the best methods of provisioning. We initiate you into the art of
besieging our cities and our strongholds. Under our guidance, you
discover the vulnerable places in the walls of our fortresses.
Murad had not enjoyed training in leadership and responsibility to fit
him for his sudden accession to the chieftainship of the Osmanlis. He
had been overshadowed by the heir apparent, and never dreamed of ruling.
Soleiman pasha, brilliant captain and idol of the army, would not have
brooked a rival in popular favour. When Orkhan died, two months after
the fatal fall of his eldest son at Bulaïr, Murad was elevated to the
emirship before he had had time to adjust himself to his new fortunes.
But he could not pause to get his bearings. The army was on the march.
The conquest of Thrace had already been started.
Osman and Orkhan were able to build up a race and a nation without
notice and, consequently, without hindrance. For their little corner of
Asia Minor had been abandoned by the Byzantines. Since the days when
Nicaea became the capital of the empire, after the Latin conquest of
Constantinople, its commercial relations with Europe were interrupted.
None knew or cared about the rise of the Osmanlis until they appeared in
Thrace. Orkhan had assured himself of his inheritance by patient
waiting. Of Murad immediate action was demanded.
The actual European conquests of Orkhan, outside of the Thracian
Chersonese, had been negligible. But Europe was excited over the capture
of Gallipoli. Murad had little to fear from a union of the indigenous
Balkan elements. Greek and Serbian and Bulgarian hate each other far
worse than they hate the Osmanli. This fact of history, demonstrated so
forcibly by the events of the year 1913, was known and appreciated at
its full value by the earliest of the Ottoman conquerors. There was,
however, just cause for apprehension of the intervention of Hungary in
conjunction with the Serbians, or of Venice in conjunction with the
Byzantines. Murad’s success depended upon his ability to gain an
immediate and vital foothold in the Balkan peninsula.
This foothold was obtained in the epoch-making campaign of 1360-1.
Astounding success attended the initial efforts of Murad. If he were not
himself a trained and seasoned warrior, he had a precious legacy of
generals in whom he could put implicit trust. Realizing his own
inexperience, he created Kara Khalil Tchenderli vizier, and allowed
himself to be guided by the judgement of this tried friend and servant
of his grandfather and his father. To Lalashahin, companion of Soleiman
in the capture of Tzympe, was given the title of beylerbey, and chief
command of the army in Thrace. Adrianople was the goal. To Evrenos bey
Murad entrusted a second army, whose mission was to prevent an attack
from the Serbians in the west.[248]
Tchorlu was the first objective point, because its capture would protect
the rear of the army operating against Adrianople. This city, only
forty-six miles from Constantinople, offered a stubborn resistance, and
had to be taken by assault. The commandant was decapitated, the garrison
massacred, and the walls razed.[249] The Osmanlis saw to it that the
fate of the defenders of Tchorlu was heralded far and wide, so that it
might serve as a lesson to other cities before which their armies
appeared. Evrenos bey, pushing forward on the left, occupied
Demotika,[250] and then Gumuldjina. This operation gave to the Osmanlis
control of the basin of the Maritza River, and removed the danger of a
Serbian attack. A column on the right moved up the coast of the Black
Sea and captured Kirk Kilisse, a position of extreme strategic
importance in preventing a possible Bulgarian attempt to relieve
Adrianople by bringing an army through the mountainous country between
the river and the sea.[251]
After the capture of Tchorlu, Murad advanced to Lule Burgas on the north
bank of the Ergene, where he effected a junction with the armies of
Evrenos and Lalashahin. The decisive battle was fought between Bunar
Hissar and Eski Baba, to which point the defenders of Adrianople had
[Illustration: THE EMIRATE OF MURAD]
advanced.[252] The Byzantines and Bulgarians were defeated. The Greek
commandant of Adrianople, with a portion of his army, managed to flee
down the Maritza to Enos.[253] it is one of the remarkable coincidences
of history that the Osmanlis should have won the first battle which
opened up to them their glorious future in Europe in exactly the same
place that was to witness five hundred and fifty years later their last
desperate stand in the Balkan peninsula.
Deserted by their commandant, and overwhelmed by the disaster of Eski
Baba, the inhabitants of Adrianople opened their gates to the
Osmanlis.[254] Murad installed Lalashahin in Adrianople, and took up his
own head-quarters in Demotika,[255] where he built a palace and a
mosque. Lalashahin, before settling down in Adrianople, carried his
victorious arms up the valley of the Maritza as far as Philippopolis,
which he fortified strongly. A stone bridge was built across the
river.[256] The occupation of Philippopolis not only gave to the
Osmanlis an advantageous base of operations against the Bulgarians, but
also brought them the most fruitful source of revenue they had yet
enjoyed. It enabled them to levy taxes upon the rice-growing industry.
Bulgarians and Serbians were both dependent upon the harvests of the
rice fields around Philippopolis.
II
In fifteen months the Osmanlis had become masters of the principal
strategic points in Thrace. This great campaign, undertaken and carried
through under the spur of necessity, was an auspicious beginning for the
reign of Murad and for the supremacy of the Osmanlis in the Balkan
peninsula. Europe was suffering from another visitation of the Black
Death.[257] The Balkan nations were completely demoralized. So unpopular
was John Palaeologos in his own capital that Murad contemplated entering
into a conspiracy with some Byzantine traitors to have John assassinated
and complete the conquest of the empire.[258] If he did enter fully into
this plot, it was as fortunate for him that the undertaking failed as it
was for the Bulgarians in 1912 that their columns did not pierce the
lines of Ottoman defence at Tchataldja. For the disaster that follows a
too extended and too rapid subjugation of unassimilated masses is as
sudden as it is irreparable. Durable empire-building is governed by a
law of homogeneity.
The Osmanlis were still a race of limited numbers, and at the beginning
of their existence as a nation. The process of assimilating the racial
elements in conquered territories, begun by Osman when he first left the
village of Sugut, could not be arrested; for the existence of the
Ottoman state depended upon its continuance. The Greek of Bithynia had
lived with Turk and Moslem for two centuries, and had found him a good
neighbour. There was neither racial antipathy nor abhorrence of the
religion of Mohammed to overcome. Nor had there been the hatred and
dread of the conquered on the one side and the arrogance of the
conqueror on the other. The Anatolian Greeks had been accustomed for
generations to the economic and political conditions that finally caused
the majority of them to cast their fortunes with the rising star of the
Osmanlis.
The problem of assimilating the Christians, who formed the total
population of the Balkan peninsula, was a new one. Here were huge and
compact masses of Christians, who had come suddenly under the yoke of
the Osmanlis in the first two years of Murad’s reign. They did not know
their new masters. They did not know Islam. Benevolent assimilation by
voluntary conversion seemed no longer possible. A radical change in the
attitude of the Osmanlis towards the question of religion was demanded.
Wholesale massacre was impracticable, for the Osmanlis had no reserve of
colonists to call upon to replace the indigenous elements. Their
position was still too precarious to allow them to draw freely from
their adherents in the corner of Asia Minor under their dominion. To win
the Macedonians and Thracians by forcible conversion was not feasible.
It required the expenditure of all his military resources for Murad to
hold what he had conquered. He could not add police duty to his already
superhuman burden. Even had he thought of this method of conversion, he
would have been deterred by the nightmare of a crusade.
Murad and his counsellors solved the problem of assimilation by
sanctioning the reduction of captives to slavery, and by creating the
corps of janissaries.
A law was promulgated which gave to the Osmanli soldier absolute right
to the possession of prisoners, unless they consented to profess and
practise Islam. Prisoners were regarded as booty. They could be kept for
domestic or agricultural labour, or sold in the open market, subject to
the government’s equity of one in five. The disgrace, even more than the
hardships, of slavery was so keenly felt by the Greeks[259] that many
for whom there was no other way preferred a change of religion to loss
of freedom. The right to make slaves of prisoners was efficacious in
providing wives and concubines for the conquerors, who were practically
without women of their own. The widows of the fallen, and the daughters
of Greeks, Serbians, and Bulgarians, became the instruments of
increasing the Ottoman race. In the hundred years from Murad I to
Mohammed II, the Osmanlis became in blood the most cosmopolitan and
vigorous race the world had known since the days of the Greeks and
Romans. Greek, Turkish, Serbian, Bulgarian, Albanian, Armenian,
Wallachian, Hungarian, German, Italian, Russian, Tartar, Mongol,
Circassian, Georgian, Persian, Syrian, and Arabian--this was the
ancestry of the Osmanlis who, under Soleiman the Magnificent, made the
whole world tremble. In richness of blood the only parallel to the
Osmanlis in modern times is the present population of the United States
and Canada.
But this indirect method of conversion as an alternative to slavery did
not immediately increase the masculine element among the Osmanlis. In a
city taken by assault the more virile portion of the male population was
killed off, and those who remained were able to buy life and freedom.
Male slaves were an embarrassment to the ever-moving armies of Murad.
Ransom money was welcomed by the captors. In many cities the inhabitants
surrendered without a struggle, and were secured in their freedom by the
terms of capitulation. In rural districts the threat of slavery was
little felt. The Osmanlis had neither time nor strength to put out the
drag-net. Everywhere in the Balkans refuge in the mountains is easy.
Then, too, the loss of cultivators would have made the highly prized
timarets worthless, and would have caused a famine in foodstuffs or a
diminution of taxes on harvests. Another means of bringing pressure to
bear upon the Christians had to be devised.
The famous corps of the janissaries was, according to the Ottoman
historians, a creation of Orkhan.[260] As a bodyguard of slaves, cut
off from their families and educated and trained to serve nearest the
person of the sovereign, the janissaries may have originated with
Orkhan. If so, it was but the adoption of the idea already put into
practice by the sovereigns of Egypt in the organization of the
Mamelukes.[261] But as an agency of forcible conversion by the
incorporation of Christian youths in the Ottoman army, there is no
evidence of its existence before Murad. In fact, historians are agreed
that the janissaries were recruited only from the Christian population
in Europe.[262] So Orkhan could hardly have conceived this scheme. The
problem of which it was a solution did not arise until after Orkhan’s
death.
That the corps of the janissaries was an agency for forcible conversion,
and was not created in order to increase the strength and efficiency of
the Ottoman army, is proved by the records we have of the number of
janissaries in the early days of Ottoman history. Murad and Bayezid are
represented as having a thousand or less janissaries. In the confusion
of the ten years of civil strife among the sons of Bayezid, the
janissaries played no part. There were only twelve hundred janissaries
in the time of Mohammed the Conqueror,[263] and twelve thousand when the
Ottoman Empire was at its zenith under Soleiman the Magnificent.[264]
But Mahmud II counted one hundred and forty thousand in his army.[265]
These figures show that this most celebrated of Ottoman military
organizations did not become a powerful factor until the period of
decadence. The janissaries were not, as has been commonly represented,
the principal element of the Osmanlis’ fighting strength in the wars of
conquest of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Their great rôle in
Ottoman history was that of maintainers and defenders of conquests
already made. In organizing the janissaries, Murad was certainly
influenced by the desire of forming a bodyguard on whose loyalty and
devotion he could rely implicitly. But his principal purpose was to
emasculate the Christian elements in Macedonia and Thrace, which were
too fanatical or too ignorant to see of their own accord that
self-interest should lead them to renounce their nationality and their
religion.
Murad’s law of drafting (_devchurmé_) provided that in each conquered
district in Europe the privilege of exemption from military service
through the payment of the capitation tax (_kharadj_) should be denied
to Christian youths. The Osmanlis reserved the right to select at
discretion Christian boys, who were taken from home and kindred and
brought up in the Mohammedan religion. They were trained for service as
the Sultan’s bodyguard. They depended directly upon the sovereign, who
paid them according to a definite scale. Their insignia were the pot and
the spoon, and their officers received names which symbolized the
functions of the camp kitchen.[266]
One is compelled to dissent from the consensus of opinion of European
historians on the organization of the janissaries. Their scathing
criticisms are best summed up in the words of a French historian: ‘It is
the most fearful tribute of human flesh that has ever been levied by
victors upon the vanquished.... It justifies the execration of which the
Osmanlis have been the object on the part of Europeans during centuries.
Let us add that, by this strange mode of recruiting, the Osmanlis have
found, at the same time, the means of taking away from the Christian
populations their most virile element, and of doubling their troops
without putting arms into the hands of the conquered.’[267]
The actual number of janissaries under arms refutes the latter part of
this criticism, when it is applied to any one of the Ottoman sovereigns
of the period of conquest. As for putting arms into the hands of the
conquered, we shall see that both Murad and Bayezid availed themselves
of the services in war of their Christian subjects, led by their own
princes. The tearing away of boys from their homes, and the loss of
their Christian heritage, is a shock to humanitarian and religious
sensibilities. But we must judge the Osmanlis of Murad and Bayezid by
the Christians of their own century. When we compare the methods of
conquest of the Osmanlis with those of the Spaniards against the Moors,
of the English against the French and Scotch, of the Italians against
each other, we must concede that Murad devised a humane, clever, and
highly successful scheme in the institution of the janissaries.
The ignorant Balkan peasantry--especially the Slavic elements--prized
their sons far more highly than their daughters. Recruiting for the army
was a greater blow to them than recruiting for the harem. It was the
strong, sturdy son who was chosen. This touched the pocket-book as well
as the heart-strings. The Anatolian Greek, especially of the cities,
had been deterred from becoming a Moslem more by a lack of eagerness to
assume military obligations than by a zeal for his ancestral faith. The
Macedonian Greek, the Bulgarian, and the Serbian regarded the bearing of
arms as a natural obligation. Fighting was a part of living. Better the
faith of Mohammed, then, than the loss of the son’s help with the
harvest. That there were wholesale conversions to Islam as a result of
the threat to apply the law of _devchurmé_ is a logical inference from
the fact that Murad never mustered more than a thousand janissaries.
III
The Byzantine Empire did not recover, even temporarily, from the effect
of Murad’s first campaign in Europe. The fall of Demotika and
Adrianople, followed so closely by that of Philippopolis, removed within
eighteen months the last hope of retrieving the fortunes of the empire.
There were still many places remaining to the Byzantines in Thrace. But
the surrender of the fortresses in the valleys of the Ergene and the
Maritza had destroyed the military prestige of the Byzantines, and
foreshadowed the speedy subjugation of the whole country. The loss of
the revenues of Thrace and of the great plain south of the main Balkan
range reduced the imperial treasury to dependence upon the port duties
and city taxes of Salonika and Constantinople. For ninety years the
shadow of the empire remained. But whatever power, whatever influence
was left to the successors of Constantine, it was rather in western
Europe than in the Balkan peninsula. The impress of one thousand and
thirty years of continuous existence from the renaming of old Byzantium
to the fall of Adrianople was too deep to vanish in a few years. The
decay had been going on for centuries. The final extinction would of
necessity take several generations.
The complete abasement of the Byzantines is revealed in the treaty that
John V Palacologos was compelled to conclude with Murad shortly after
the capture of Philippopolis. In the fall of 1362 or the spring of 1363,
John bound himself to refrain from any attempt to win back what he had
lost in Thrace, either by a separate attack or by joining the Serbians
or other enemies of the Osmanlis. In addition he promised to aid Murad
against his Anatolian enemies, the Turkish emirs.[268]
After this treaty was signed, Murad withdrew to Brusa in order to
provide for the organization of the new possessions that had come to him
by a successful expedition against Angora. His letters, written at this
time to announce to his Anatolian neighbours and to the Moslem princes
of Asia the victories in Thrace, show clearly that he did not yet feel
himself strong enough to assume the position of overlord to the other
great emirs of Asia Minor. While he was in Brusa, in the spring of 1363,
an event happened which led Murad to make the momentous decision that
shaped the destinies of the Ottoman Empire. The first coalition against
the Osmanlis was formed in Europe.
IV
After the fall of Philippopolis, the Greek commandant had succeeded in
escaping, and took refuge with Kral Urosh V of Serbia.[269] He pointed
out to Urosh most eloquently the paucity of numbers of the Osmanlis,
their insecure position, and the danger that would overwhelm the
Serbians if they waited until the Osmanlis were firmly grounded in
Thrace. Urged by Pope Urban V, the princes of Wallachia and Bosnia,
together with King Louis of Hungary, joined the Serbians in upper
Macedonia. Under the guidance of the Greek refugee, they started on a
swift march to win back Adrianople. It was an expedition undertaken as
a crusade. The allies mustered at least twenty thousand.
Lalashahin had hardly more than twelve thousand men under his command,
and a portion of these were scattered in the captured cities. Murad, who
had started to return to Thrace as soon as he had heard the news, was
detained by the necessity of capturing a fortress on the Sea of Marmora,
near Cyzicus, which was in the hands of a turbulent band of
second-generation Catalans, whom he feared to leave behind him.[270]
They were suspected of plotting with his southern rivals to organize a
movement against his Anatolian possessions.
If the Greeks had had the power or the will to co-operate with the
crusaders, the Ottoman domination in Thrace would have ended even more
suddenly than it had begun. But they made no move. In fact, one of the
Byzantine historians charges John Palaeologos with aiding the
Osmanlis![271] Lalashahin was able to draw from the garrisons of the
recently occupied cities, and to send forward to meet the crusaders some
ten thousand men under Hadji Ilbeki. It was the intention of Lalashahin
to have this army act wholly on the defensive. If only Hadji Ilbeki
could prevent their passing the Maritza, they would be turned southward
towards Enos. By that time he felt sure that he could rely upon one of
three things happening: dissensions would arise among the crusaders, the
Greeks would be alarmed by the Serbian approach to Enos and the sea and
attack the crusaders, or Murad would have time to bring his army across
the Dardanelles. The one purpose of Lalashahin was to prevent the
invasion of Thrace and the investment of Adrianople.
But Hadji Ilbeki did better than keep the crusaders from crossing the
river. They had already crossed, and had celebrated the unopposed
passage of the Maritza by an evening of feasting. Hadji Ilbeki surprised
them as they were sleeping in a drunken stupor.[272] Without hesitation
he fell upon them like a Gideon. Seized with panic, the crusaders were
driven back into the river. Those who escaped massacre and drowning fled
precipitately. There was no attempt to rally. In the little town of
Mariazell, on the northern frontier of Styria near the foot of the
Semmering Alps, there stands a votive church built by Louis out of
gratitude to the Virgin for having saved him from death in this
battle.[273]
Lalashahin, instead of rewarding the daring of his lieutenant, which had
saved the Osmanlis from an irreparable disaster, was consumed with
jealous fury. His only thought when he received the news was that Hadji
Ilbeki had robbed him of the glory of so great a victory. He had his too
successful subordinate poisoned.[274]
The sudden and complete collapse of the first crusade organized against
the Osmanlis did not give to Murad any false sense of security. He saw
in the successful meeting of this danger, which had threatened to
destroy him, not the opportunity for exultation and for the relaxation
of effort, but the spur for straining still further every nerve to learn
and profit by the lesson. The battle of the Maritza was a warning to
Murad. The danger would be renewed, and renewed soon. It was now for him
to make the choice between remaining an Asiatic emir and becoming a
European sovereign, between endeavouring to impose first his authority
on the other emirs of Asia Minor and the conquest of the Balkan
peninsula. Were the Osmanlis to be on the offensive in Europe or in
Asia?
Murad decided to build his empire in the Balkan peninsula. It was not
that he coveted less the mountains and valleys of Asia Minor. It was not
that his ambitions failed to extend to the Taurus. But he had the vision
to realize that the Ottoman race could not subjugate the Turkish
elements in Asia Minor by a gradual assimilation of those elements
alone. The race had to grow, as it began, by the incorporation of the
various Christian elements, which alone possessed the finesse, the
knowledge of government, the organizing capacity necessary to cope with
the problems of facing Europe and inheriting the Byzantine Empire. From
Europe, Asia Minor and more could be conquered: from Asia, no portion of
Europe could be conquered.
The Osmanlis do not possess written records of the reign of Murad. There
is no source to which we can go to read what Murad thought or what
others of his day thought or said that he thought. But we know his mind
from his actions. There is no cause for doubt on this point. After the
first campaign in Thrace, Murad had returned to Brusa, and dated his
letters from there. He began to plan an aggressive campaign against his
neighbours. But after the battle of the Maritza, he abandoned Brusa for
Demotika, and three years later, in 1366, Adrianople became the first
real capital of the Ottoman Empire.
In spite of all that has been written about the unique position of Brusa
in Ottoman history, it is no more to the Osmanlis than is Saint-Denis to
the French or Winchester to the English. The Osmanlis have never really
been at home in Constantinople. Historically and architecturally
speaking, they have been under the shadow of a greater past.
Adrianople, although always a city of importance since the days of
Hadrian, reached its greatest splendour and glory under the Ottoman
sultans. Here were planned, and from here started, the expeditions
westward and eastward, which increased in strength, in efficiency, and
in inspiring terror as the circle gradually widened, until the star and
crescent appeared under the walls of Vienna and Cairo, on the shores of
Italy and in the heart of Persia. No student of Ottoman annals can fail
to support the contention of the Sublime Porte after the last Balkan
war, that Adrianople is to the Osmanlis their sacred city. From
Lalashahin to Shukri pasha, the proudest and most precious memories of
the Osmanlis are in Adrianople, whose great mosque, still awe-inspiring
and altogether admirable in its decay, is typical both of what has been
and what is.
The decision of Murad was accepted by his successors. Even after the
capture of Constantinople, many an Ottoman sultan felt more at home in
Adrianople than in the imperial city. For more than a century the
Osmanlis directed their energies almost exclusively to European
conquests. Whatever they accomplished in Asia was the indirect result of
their stupendous successes in Europe. From first to last, the extension
of Ottoman sovereignty over the Moslems of Asia was by means of a
soldiery gathered and war-hardened in Europe, themselves Christian or of
Christian ancestry, in whose veins ran the blood of Greek and Roman, of
Goth and Hun, of Albanian and Slav.
V
In 1365, Murad received from the outside world the first acknowledgement
of his commanding position as heir apparent of the Byzantine Empire. It
was an overture from the flourishing republic of Ragusa, on the
Dalmatian coast, for a treaty guaranteeing freedom of trade in the
Ottoman dominions to the merchants of Ragusa. In return for
unrestricted commercial privileges, the republic offered to pay a large
sum annually, which the givers called a grant, but which was invariably
accepted by the recipients as tribute.[275] However it may have been at
the beginning, the grant soon became tribute, for after some years the
existence of Ragusa depended upon purchasing the benevolence of the
Ottoman sultans. As the helplessness of the Ragusans increased, the
tribute became larger. If we except the convention between the Genoese
and Orkhan, of whose provisions and character we know nothing, the
Ragusan commercial treaty is the first of the long series of treaties by
which European cities and nations purchased the right to trade in the
Ottoman Empire and to sail the high seas. Since in most cases the
Osmanlis pledged themselves to nothing except to refrain from robbing
merchants or from preventing their trading, the gifts exacted were
nothing less than blackmail. After the sea-power of the Osmanlis had
been broken, the Barbary corsairs inherited the privileges of this
system which had been started in so small a way by the Ragusans.
Murad could not write. When the treaty with Ragusa was brought for his
signature, he put his hand in the ink and made the impression of his
fingers upon the paper. This is the origin of the _tughra_, which has
ever since been the official signature of the house of Osman.[276]
VI
When Murad was settling himself in Adrianople, and laying plans for the
conquest of Macedonia and Bulgaria, he was menaced by a new crusade.
Despite its futile ending, or better, for that very reason, the
expedition of Amadeo of Savoy in 1366 commands our attention. For it
furnishes, as does the expedition of Admiral Boucicaut from Genoa in
1399, a striking illustration of how easily the growing Ottoman power
might have been crushed by a resolute body of crusaders with a single
aim, and of how impossible it was to secure that oneness of purpose,
owing to the ingrained animosity of the East and West, of the Greek and
Catholic Churches.
In 1361, when Lorenzo Celsi was elevated to the dogeship of Venice, the
Senate had made overtures to John Palaeologos for an alliance against
Murad.[277] This plan was frustrated by the successes of the Osmanlis in
Thrace. The Venetians held back, and allowed John to suffer the
humiliation of signing the treaty that made him a vassal of Murad. In
the crusade that ended in the disaster of the Maritza, the Venetian
participation was half-hearted, and it proved valueless. The Venetians
were not even on hand to prevent Murad from crossing the Dardanelles. In
fact, there is every reason to believe that they now began to look upon
the Osmanlis as a valuable tool in checkmating the ambition of Louis of
Hungary to inherit the shortlived empire of Stephen Dushan.[278]
When he saw that Murad had come into Thrace to stay, and that there was
no hope from the Venetians, John Palaeologos turned to the Hungarians.
He made a secret visit to Buda to enlist the aid of Louis, and made the
usual promise that the Byzantines would return to the Roman fold.[279]
On his return he passed through the principality of Sisman, who had just
inherited the lower portion of Bulgaria. Sisman, either at the
suggestion of Andronicus Palaeologos, who wanted to succeed his father,
or in the hope of winning favour with Murad, detained the emperor in
the fortress of Nicopolis on the Danube.[280]
Amadeo VI of Savoy was one of the princes who had taken the cross from
Pope Urban V at Avignon on Holy Friday, 1363, for the crusade that never
materialized. The receipt of a letter from Louis of Hungary, informing
him of the imprisonment of his cousin (John’s mother was a princess of
Savoy), and pointing out the rapid spread of Ottoman power, caused
Amadeo to yield to the Pope’s continued and urgent solicitations.[281]
With some fifteen hundred soldiers, he embarked for the East on fifteen
galleys. After a stop at Negropont and Mitylene to get reinforcements,
Amadeo entered the Hellespont, and captured Gallipoli without
difficulty. The Osmanlis fled by night, abandoning the fortress.[282]
But the Savoyards made no attempt to follow up this victory, or even to
keep Gallipoli. Instead of attacking the infidels, they sailed into the
Black Sea, and started a vigorous campaign against the Bulgarians.
Sozopolis and Burgas were captured, and several other important
fortresses to the north. The bravery of the crusaders was rivalled only
by their cruelty. Their bloodlust made such an impression upon the
Bulgarians that they wanted nothing to do with Franks bearing the cross.
When the Savoyards laid siege to Varna, Sisman gave up his prisoner to
save the city.
John Palaeologos was borne back triumphantly to Constantinople. But
friction soon arose. When Amadeo urged upon his kinsman the necessity
of paying the price of his rescue and of the continued support of the
crusaders by fulfilling his promise to return to the Roman Church, he
met with stubborn refusal on the part of emperor and patriarch alike. In
wild rage, Amadeo withdrew to Pera, and began to fight the Greeks by sea
and land. The Constantinopolitans were so frightened that ‘they did not
dare to show their head out of doors’. Pressed on all sides by Osmanli
and Bulgarian, as well as by his deliverers, the wretched John saw no
other way out than to promise openly to abjure his errors and swear
allegiance to the Pope.
Having wrung this promise from those whom he had come to defend, Amadeo
sailed away to Rome, where he reported to the Pope in full consistory
‘how at his request the emperor of Constantinople and his people desired
to submit to the obedience and belief of the Holy Roman Church in hope
that the Church would aid them against the infidels who were too
strongly oppressing them’.
Urban and the cardinals listened without great interest to the Count of
Savoy’s recital of his success in preparing the ground for a reunion of
the churches. The story was getting to be an old one. John’s overture
was received with suspicion. Urban had got the same promise in the
spring of 1366 in a letter from Louis, which reported the interview John
had sought at Buda.[283] To the envoy of Louis, who had arrived in
Avignon just as Urban was starting for Rome, the Pope gave a letter
commanding the King of Hungary to put off his crusade until the union of
the churches was actually accomplished.[284]
VII
What lay behind the eagerness of Urban, at the beginning of his reign,
to revive the crusades? Was he burning with holy zeal to recover the
sepulchre of Christ from the hands of the Moslems? Was his heart set on
protecting Cyprus and Rhodes? Had he determined to leave no stone
unturned to protect the Byzantines and other eastern Christians from the
encroachment and persecution of Murad? His letters indicate that his
chief interest was the recovery of the lost power and glory of the
papacy. There is the same revelation in the letters of his immediate
successor, Gregory XI. These two popes had no catholic vision. They
tried to keep their position as arbiters between France and England and
Spain at Avignon, and at the same time to inherit the temporal power of
the decaying Holy Roman Empire by circumventing the Visconti of Milan.
The great schism in the Western Church, which so aided Murad and Bayezid
in laying solidly the foundations of an empire in Europe, was the
outcome of the short-sighted and purely selfish policy of these two
popes. How far from the truth it is to represent them as courageously,
whole-heartedly, and persistently endeavouring to awaken the interest
and attention of Europe in the peril from the East!
The fall of Adrianople and of Philippopolis should have been a warning
to Urban. He read in it, however, not a glorious opportunity to
demonstrate the solidarity of Christendom by driving the Moslems out of
Europe and rescuing fellow Christians from apostasy, slavery, and death,
but an occasion to force the schismatic Greeks to return to the Roman
communion. Of the popes of the fourteenth century, Urban had the
greatest chance to prove himself a worthy champion of Christ and
civilization. For it was during his reign that the Osmanlis began their
conquests and their proselytizing in Europe. At the beginning they could
easily have been checked. But it never occurred to Urban that there was
a common interest of Christendom higher than and outside of the Roman
Church.
The fault lay not wholly with Urban and with Gregory. They reflected the
spirit of their age. But it does no credit to their personal character
nor to the high position which they held to say that they were the
victims, rather than the masters, of the prevailing bigotry and
ignorance of their generation. In the fourteenth century, the West had
already begun to try to impose its commerce, its customs, its laws, and
its religion upon the East. There was not, nor has there ever been
since, a sympathetic ‘give and take’ between Occident and Orient. In a
mint, if the coin when stamped does not correspond exactly to the mould,
it is rejected. Similarly the West, when it tries to put every eastern
people through its mould and finds no exact correspondence, rejects.
Hence, on the one side, the scorn of the ‘I am better than thou’: on the
other side, a hatred born not only of fear and of conviction of
inferiority, but of a sense of injustice which is none the less vital
from a knowledge that the wrong is not, and will not be, righted.
Amadeo of Savoy, uncivilized, fanatical through ignorance, the fertile
breeding-ground of fanaticism, true and unchanged descendant of the
Fourth Crusaders, was a prophetic figure at Constantinople in 1366. He
represented the only possible type of deliverer for Byzantium. But
deliverance on his terms the Greeks would not accept. Death or Islam
were preferable. And who can blame them? Two years before Amadeo’s
expedition, the Greeks of Crete had risen in rebellion against their
Venetian overlords because an attempt had been made to impose upon them
the Latin faith and rites.[285] When they were hunted down and massacred
for refusing to worship after the western fashion, not only Pope Urban,
but also Petrarch, wrote to the Doge congratulating him upon his valiant
and successful efforts to save the Church of Christ in Crete![286]
In a letter to Pope Urban, Petrarch spoke with approval of the policy of
using the Ottoman menace to stamp out the Eastern heresy. ‘The Osmanlis
are merely enemies,’ he wrote, ‘but the schismatic Greeks are worse than
enemies. The Osmanlis hate us less, for they fear us less. The Greeks,
however, both fear and hate us with all their soul.’[287] These words of
Petrarch epitomize the feeling between the Eastern and Western Churches
during his own day, and, if what one can see with his own eyes in
Jerusalem and elsewhere is a fair example, up to the twentieth
century.[288]
If the European nations regarded the adherents of the Orthodox Church
(the term Greek in its religious sense must be taken to include all the
Balkan races) as ‘worse than enemies’, that is, than the Osmanlis, it is
equally true that the Osmanlis found from 1350 to 1500 that the hatred
of the Balkan races for the Latin Church was their most potent ally, not
only in the actual conquest, but in reconciling the conquered to their
fate. One does not want to detract from the genius of the early Ottoman
sovereigns and from the reputation for superb fighting ability so
honestly won by the Ottoman armies. But it must not be forgotten that
each separate race in the Balkans preferred the rule of the Osmanlis to
that of their neighbours, and that the one point in which the Balkan
races were of the same mind was that Ottoman domination was preferable
to that of the Hungarians and the Italians. For every crusade was a
scheme for religious propaganda and territorial aggrandizement, in just
the same spirit as in modern times the nations of Europe have exploited
the misery of Ottoman Christians for the purpose of securing
concessions.
In spite of the fact that John Palaeologos was informed by the Patriarch
Philotheus that a mixed council of clergy and government officials,
presided over by the empress, had been held in June 1376, and had
decided against the reunion of the churches,[289] John persisted in his
negotiations with the Pope. Urban did all that he could to facilitate
the visit of the Byzantine emperor to Rome.[290] But at the same time he
was writing to the Venetians and to the Dalmatian cities to protect the
Catholics of Cattaro against the Serbian and Albanian heretics,[291] and
was encouraging Louis in his suicidal campaign against the Bulgarians.
In 1369, John Palaeologos left the government of Constantinople to his
elder son Andronicus, and set out for Rome, where, on October
eighteenth, he made his profession of faith in the presence of four
cardinals, and confirmed it by a golden bull. The next morning, at St.
Peter’s, he formally abjured the errors of the Orthodox Church before
the high altar, with his hands in those of the Pope.[292] The Pope
accepted him as a ‘son of the Church’, promised that he should be
relieved of the Turk, and gave him letters earnestly recommending his
cause to the princes of Christendom.[293]
Urban V was quick to use the prestige which he believed the adhesion of
John Palaeologos had given him. He announced broadcast the happy
consummation of his efforts, stating that the Byzantine emperor had done
homage to the Vicar of Christ in St. Peter’s.[294] But letters sent
during the same winter to the Greek clergy, urging them to accept the
action of their emperor,[295] and other letters from his secret
correspondence of this year, indicate how little faith he had in the
Emperor’s sincerity or ability to fulfil his promises. Was the
abjuration in St. Peter’s a farce, in which Emperor and Pope allowed
themselves to trifle with holy things, each for the sake of his
immediate advantage?
John had hoped that his adhesion to the Roman Church would bring to him
grants of money, ships, and men from the Latin princes, and that an army
would rally around him to fight the Osmanlis. But not only did he return
from France ‘with empty hands’, but he was detained at Venice because of
debts owing to merchants. In vain he begged Andronicus to send the money
for his release. The son who had four years before been charged with
being party to his father’s imprisonment in Bulgaria was no more filial
at this humiliating crisis. He answered that there was no money in the
treasury, and that he could get nothing from the clergy. But his younger
son, Manuel, brought from Salonika the ransom.[296]
John Palaeologos returned to his capital poorer than when he left. He
brought no help from Europe, and he had bound himself publicly by oath
to an obligation which he had known he could not fulfil. He had broken
faith with Murad, who during these years had been growing more and more
powerful. There was nothing for him to do but to make himself tributary
to Murad in order that he might enjoy ‘up to the end of his life’ his
last possessions in peace.[297] Three years later, in 1373, when his
ambassador John Lascaris failed in a second attempt to get aid from the
Western princes,[298] the Byzantine emperor recognized Murad as his
suzerain, promised to do military service in person in Murad’s army, and
gave to him his son Manuel as hostage.[299]
Urban died a few months after John’s visit to Rome. Gregory XI, who
succeeded him in December 1370, had little hope of carrying on further
negotiations with the Eastern Church; for the Greek ecclesiastics were
stubborn in their determination to maintain the absolute independence of
the patriarchate. The Genoese and Venetians were fighting bitterly in
Cyprus. In 1371, Gregory made a strong appeal to France, England,
Venice, and Flanders to co-operate with Genoa in saving the last
Christians of the Holy Land.[300] There was no response.
That Gregory realized clearly the peril to Christendom in the advance of
Murad’s armies is shown in two remarkable letters written to Louis of
Hungary in May and November 1372. His words were prophetic. He urged
Louis to resist the Osmanlis before they advanced farther into Europe.
They had already entered Serbia. He trembled to think what would happen
if they pushed through Albania and secured a port on the Adriatic.
Unless Louis entered without delay into an alliance with his Christian
neighbours, how could he protect his own kingdom and all Christendom
from the Mohammedan peril.[301] Seconding this warning to the King of
Hungary, the Pope commanded the Hungarian and Slavic archbishops to
preach the crusade in Hungary, Poland, and the Dalmatian cities.
Everywhere special boxes were placed in the churches for collecting
funds. A tithe was levied on the monasteries and abbeys of Hungary and
Dalmatia. Louis, with five of his most powerful nobles, took the cross,
and swore to the Pope that he would put an army in the field within a
year.[302] Louis asked Venice for triremes, but when the Venetians found
that he intended them to be a donation for ‘the common cause’, they
found that they could not build them.[303] Padua declined an invitation
to guarantee the cost of construction. The Hungarians did not fulfil
their promises. In fact, there is no evidence that they made any effort
to acquit themselves of their oath.
When John Palaeologos made a last desperate appeal to the Pope, before
he entered into his third and final compact with Murad, Gregory, in
receiving the imperial envoy, burst into tears, and promised that he
would save Constantinople, if only the Byzantine emperor would cause his
people to renounce their heresies and return to the Roman Church. In
1375, he wrote once more to Louis to inform him that Constantinople was
in danger of capture from Murad.[304] Letters in the same year to Edward
of England pictured the Ottoman advance and the peril of Christendom,
urged a general war against the Osmanlis, and asked for a subsidy to
provide galleys ‘to prevent the crossing into Europe of more Turks,
because Constantinople is in imminent danger’.[305] The letters of
Gregory XI to the Christian princes prove conclusively that the full
import of Murad’s early successes was understood by the Pope and was
impressed upon both secular and ecclesiastical authorities throughout
Europe.
But both John and Gregory lost heart. Neither was able to fulfil the
compact made in Rome. Gregory could not unite Christendom to relieve the
Byzantines. John could not persuade the Byzantines to renounce, as he
had done, the ‘Greek heresies’. So, as we have seen, he became Murad’s
vassal.[306] The Pope, involved in the quarrel of Emperor Charles IV and
the Duke of Bavaria with the Marquis of Brandenburg, and anxious over
the outcome, for the papacy, of the continual unrest in the Italian
cities, returned from Avignon to Rome in 1378. He died a few months
later.[307] The struggle arising from the election of Gregory’s
successor gave birth to the ‘Great Schism’. This left Murad a free hand
in subjugating the Balkan peninsula.
VIII
The sources of information for the movements from the outside for the
relief of the Balkan Christians, and for the religious and political
quarrels of the Byzantines, are so numerous and so detailed that one is
embarrassed by too much material. Many interesting facts cannot even be
mentioned. But when we come to the beginning of the Ottoman conquest in
Europe under Murad and Bayezid, we find ourselves in the midst of what
an eminent Slavic historian has called ‘the most obscure and difficult
period of South-Slavic history’.[308] The chroniclers, whether they be
Slavic, Rumanian, or Ottoman, are so contradictory and so lacking in
explicit statement that we cannot speak with certainty of the sequence
of events. The Byzantine chroniclers, verbose to the point of weariness
in detailing petty and trifling quarrels and happenings, are almost
silent concerning the momentous events that marked the ruin of their
empire. It is difficult to unravel the twisted skeins, and find a thread
to carry the story of the conquest from 1366 to 1389. When it is
impossible to choose between contradictory records, the geography of the
field of action, with which one can gain a first-hand knowledge, must
be the final factor in determining the sequence of conquest between the
adoption of Adrianople by Murad as his capital and the downfall of the
Serbians at Kossova.
The occupation of Adrianople and Philippopolis was as severe a blow to
the Bulgarians as to the Byzantines. In spite of the fact, however, that
Greek and Bulgarian had a common interest in driving the Osmanli from
Thrace, or at the very least in checking his advance, there was no move
made at this time for an alliance. On the contrary, even when the
Osmanlis were engaged in the Thracian campaign, war arose between John V
and Alexander. The Byzantines captured Anchiale, and tried desperately
to take Mesembria by assault.[309] The Greek patriarch wrote to Czar
Alexander, reminding him of the sacredness of harmony and the necessity
of accord at that critical moment, but the letter was not backed by the
good faith and good will of the Byzantine emperor. Neither John nor
Alexander attempted to give assistance to the Serbian and Hungarian
crusade that ended so disastrously on the banks of the Maritza.
The conquest of Bulgaria up to the main Balkan range imposed itself upon
Murad as a corollary to the Ottoman dominion in Thrace, and the
undisturbed possession of Adrianople and Philippopolis. For the
Bulgarians, through centuries of varying fortunes, had grown accustomed
to fighting for the right to live in Thrace. Often had they been beaten
back to the Balkans, and as often pressed forward again to the Ergene.
To win and lose Adrianople and other Thracian cities was old history
with them. They always came back. Between 1362 and 1365, Murad had
experience with Bulgarian persistence and tenacity of purpose. They were
masters again of Kirk Kilisse, Midia, Bunar Hissar, and Viza when Murad
made his change of capital from Brusa to Adrianople. Yamboli had been
strongly fortified by Alexander. Bulgaria seemed as formidable and as
forbidding to Murad’s dream of empire as the emirates of Asia Minor.
Fortune again favoured the Osmanlis. Czar Alexander died in 1365,[310]
leaving three heirs. To John Sisman fell middle and southern Bulgaria
from the Danube to the Rhodope Mountains and the Bulgarian pretensions
in Thrace. Old Tirnovo was his capital. Stracimir inherited western
Bulgaria, with Widin for capital, and the Bulgarian pretensions to the
valley of the Vardar and western Macedonia. (The Bulgarian remnant of
eastern Macedonia was in the hands of an independent Bulgarian prince,
Constantine, whose stronghold was Kustendil.) Dobrotich became master of
the Dobrudja and the upper Black Sea coast, where Bulgarian, Cuman and
Alan lived together with hardly any distinguishing characteristics.
The division of Bulgaria, at the moment when union was essential, proved
fatal. The sons of Alexander never joined to face the common danger. So
marked was the division of Alexander’s kingdom that thirty years after
the conquest the conquered territories were known as ‘the three
Bulgarias’.[311]
Stracimir, jealous because Sisman seemed to have received the lion’s
share of Alexander’s inheritance, did not hesitate to make overtures to
Murad, offering to co-operate with the Osmanlis against his brother and
to share the portion of Sisman with them.[312] Before any agreement
could be made, however, Stracimir found himself face to face with a
terrible danger in the west, which soon caused him to forget both Sisman
and Murad. Louis of Hungary had interpreted his crusader’s commission
as an authorization to ‘make war against the heretics’. It was a pretext
to get possession of Widin, which was essential to his ambitious project
of adding Serbia to his kingdom. He attacked the Bulgarians on the
ground that they were enemies of the Church and must be forced to
acknowledge the supremacy of Rome. Widin was captured and Stracimir
imprisoned.[313] Stracimir’s dominions were flooded with Franciscan
missionaries, who were backed by a brutal soldiery in their
proselytizing efforts.[314] Two hundred thousand Bulgarians abjured the
orthodox heresy, and were re-baptized in the Latin rite. This forcible
conversion, which was purely a political matter, was as objectionable to
the Bulgarians as to the Cretans. They hated ‘with a perfect hatred’ the
Franciscans whom Pope Urban had sent, and the cause for which they
stood.
At the first opportunity, the Bulgarians of the west called in Sisman
and Vadislav of Wallachia. The Hungarians were driven out of Widin and
the Franciscans in the city massacred.[315] Louis was powerful enough to
wreak terrible vengeance. In 1370, Widin fell once more into his hands.
The Bulgarians of the western Balkans were subjected to such a
relentless persecution that they welcomed the Moslem conquest to secure
freedom of worship. Urban had incited Louis to this war, and had
congratulated him upon his laudable zeal in converting the
heretics.[316]
We have already spoken of the punishment that came to Sisman as a result
of the detention of John Palaeologos. The Italian crusaders on the Black
Sea coast were as powerful an aid to Murad’s empire-building as were the
Hungarian crusaders on the western frontier. The successors of Louis
reaped the bitter fruits of his insane policy. Louis and Amadeo of Savoy
contributed in no little measure to make possible the conquests of
Murad. When Amadeo withdrew from Bulgaria, he left the cities he had
captured to the Greeks. Sisman was compelled to expend his energy in
recapturing them. But Murad had already anticipated him in the important
fortress of Sozopolis, which commanded the entrance to the port of
Burgas.[317]
Shortly after the Ottoman occupation of Sozopolis, the Bulgarians were
everywhere dispossessed in Thrace, and the capture of Yamboli[318]
forced Sisman to follow the example of John Palaeologos. He became a
vassal of Murad. His sister Mara entered Murad’s harem, but with the
stipulation that she be allowed to retain her Christian faith.
Murad gladly gave his new ally and brother-in-law a strong Ottoman army
to co-operate in the attack upon the Hungarians. The Osmanlis helped in
driving Louis out of Widin. Sisman, like Cantacuzenos, first guided the
Osmanlis through the heart of his country. It was under the leadership
of Sisman that they saw the Danube, their river of destiny. When Sisman,
even with the help of the Osmanlis and Wallachians, could not gain
possession of Stracimir’s inheritance, he returned to Tirnovo. There he
learned that Lalashahin was planning an expedition westward, which
seemed to be intended against Sofia.
Sisman now realized that his position was critical and that the fate of
Bulgaria was at stake. In the early spring of 1371, he hurried into the
Rilo Mountains and sent out an appeal to the Serbian kral who was at
that time ruling in eastern Macedonia. Then he went to the relief of
Ishtiman, which was already menaced by the Osmanlis. Failing in this
effort, Sisman fell back to Samakov, where he was joined by the
Serbians. Lalashahin led his army from Ishtiman into the valley of the
Isker. The two krals joined battle with him in the plain of Samakov.
The Ottoman victory was decisive.[319] The Serbians and Bulgarians fled
into the recesses of Musalla, the highest mountain in the Balkan
peninsula, and of Popova Shapka. Sisman disappeared after the
battle.[320] The way to Sofia was open. All Bulgaria lay at the feet of
the conqueror. It is from the battle of Samakov that we must date the
destruction of an independent Bulgaria.
But Murad was not yet ready to follow up this decisive victory. The only
immediate result of the battle of Samakov was the submission of
Constantine, Bulgarian prince of Kustendil, in the upper valley of the
Struma. After the fall of Samakov, his position was untenable.
Constantine hurried to Murad’s camp, and did homage to the conqueror.
Murad gave back to him as vassal his principality.[321] With the wisdom
that marked every successive step of his progress in Europe, Murad
refrained from advancing beyond Samakov. He ordered Lalashahin to lead
the army into Macedonia, and to join Evrenos in the advance towards the
Vardar.
IX
The dramatic death of Stephen Dushan, in 1355, just as he was starting
upon the expedition against Constantinople for which his whole life had
been a preparation, is recorded in the previous chapter. Stephen’s son
was so unfit to inherit the aspirations and carry on the work of his
father that he was called in derision by his people Nejaki, the
weakling.[322] The nobles and generals of Stephen Nejaki ignored him.
Each man seized what territory he could hold and defend against his
neighbour. There was anarchy in Macedonia and Serbia. The dissolution of
Stephen Dushan’s conquests resulted in a bloody and destructive civil
war between cities and factions.[323] The dowager Czarina managed to
preserve a semblance of prestige, if not of authority, at Serres. But
the ‘empire’ was no more. As local rulers, Serbians stayed in the
principal cities of Macedonia. There was undoubtedly a Serbian element
in the village population. Many villagers, however, who acknowledged the
overlordship of Stephen’s warriors and other Serbian nobles, did not
know then, _any more than they know now_, to what race they themselves
belonged. This has always been the Macedonian problem.
The defeat of the crusaders on the banks of the Maritza in 1363 had been
a defensive battle on the part of the Osmanlis. There was no attempt to
invade Macedonia. While Murad was occupied in the subjugation of Thrace
and of southern Bulgaria, several efforts were made by the Byzantines to
come to an understanding with the Serbians. In 1364, the patriarch
Callixtus went to Serres to see Stephen’s widow, who had retired to a
convent. His purpose was to form an alliance. Soon after reaching
Serres, Callixtus succumbed to the hardships of the journey.[324] His
effort came to nothing. That Stephen’s son still held to the pretensions
of his father and had no intention of treating with the Byzantines, is
demonstrated by a bull, dated from Pristina in 1365, in which he calls
himself ‘emperor of the Servians and of the Greeks’.[325]
Stephen Urosh, the ‘weakling’, died in 1367.[326] Uglesa, who usurped
the kralship of Serres and shared the ‘empire’ of Stephen Dushan with
his brothers and fellow adventurers, Vukasin and Goiko,[327] sent an
embassy to the patriarch Philotheos declaring that he would annul the
bull of 1352, by which Dushan had created an autocephalous Serbian
Church,[328] and would cause all the Serbians to return to the Orthodox
allegiance.[329] After three years of negotiation, precious time wasted
with trifling formalities, the reconciliation and union of the Serbian
and Greek Churches was effected.[330] But, if we are to believe the
authorities of Orbini, Uglesa, while he was negotiating with the Greeks
of Constantinople, had levied tribute upon the Greeks of Salonika, and
would have made himself master of Salonika, had not his untimely death
prevented the consummation of the great Serbian dream.[331]
At the time of the reconciliation with the Orthodox Church, Uglesa had
completed a plan of united action with his two brothers to oppose the
Ottoman invasion of Macedonia.[332] Uglesa had been informed that a
great army was gathered in Adrianople, which awaited the return of Murad
from Bulgaria to commence its march. Four weeks after the negotiations
with the Byzantines had been successfully concluded, in the early summer
of 1371, the Serbian army reached the Maritza at Cernomen,[333] between
Adrianople and Svilen.[334] This battle has been confused with the
earlier battle of 1363, and it is impossible to separate the accounts of
the two actions.[335] The Osmanlis were again victorious. Uglesa and
Goiko were drowned in the Maritza. Vukasin escaped from the field of
battle only to be killed by his servant for the gold chain he wore
around his neck.[336]
The battle of Cernomen lost Macedonia to the Serbians. The three princes
were killed. Most of the Serbian adventurers who had been the companions
of Stephen Dushan, and who had profited by his Macedonian conquests,
disappeared. The Osmanlis had no opposition in penetrating to the valley
of the Vardar.
The monk Isaias of Serres has left a graphic contemporary picture of the
Ottoman invasion of Macedonia. ‘Like the birds of Heaven, the
Ishmaelites spread themselves over the land, and never ceased murdering
the inhabitants or carrying them off into slavery. The country was empty
of men, of cattle, and of the fruits of the fields. There was no prince
or leader: there was no redeemer or saviour among the people. All faded
away before the fear of the Ishmaelites, and even the brave hearts of
heroic men were transformed into weak hearts of women. Rightly were the
dead envied by the living.’[337]
The invasion of Macedonia in 1371-2 was as rapid and decisive a campaign
as the invasion of Thrace had been ten years before. Kavalla, Drama and
Serres were occupied by Khaïreddin and Evrenos.[338] Drama and Serres
were colonized, their churches converted into mosques, and they soon
became the residence of the owners of the timarets granted in eastern
Macedonia. These two cities have always been the strongholds of the
Mohammedan element in Macedonia, and the residence of the great Moslem
landowners. The cities and villages in the valleys of the Mesta and the
Struma acknowledged Murad as sovereign, and submitted without resistance
to Ottoman laws and Ottoman taxation.[339] Where-ever it was safe to do
so, Murad seized the lands, and appointed Ottoman governors. In
districts where pacification would have proved a difficult task, he
allowed Serbian chiefs to rule as his vassals.
With the same impetuosity that had carried them to the foothills of the
Rhodope Mountains after the capture of Adrianople, the Osmanlis crossed
the Vardar in 1372, and pushed their arms into Old Serbia, Albania,
Bosnia, and even to the mountains of Dalmatia, from which they could see
the Adriatic.[340] Other adventurous bands, eager to attract the
attention, the commendation, and the rewards of Murad, followed the
footsteps of the Catalans, traversed Thessaly, and appeared in the
plains of Attica.[341]
Murad destroyed the Macedonian empire of Stephen Dushan without great
effort. The Serbians remaining east of the Vardar, nobles and peasants,
became Ottoman subjects. In upper Serbia, they rallied round one of
their number, Lazar Gresljanovitch, whom they formally elected as
successor of the Serbian kings. But Lazar was so weak that he did not
take the title of emperor (_tzar_) or of king (_kral_), but called
himself merely prince (_knez_).[342] To secure the existence of his
kingdom or principality, he sought peace with Murad, and, following the
example of the Byzantine and Bulgarian rulers, became vassal and
tributary of the Ottoman emir.[343]
X
Before the end of the year 1372, it was recognized that the Osmanlis had
come into the Balkans to stay. The conquest of Macedonia east of the
Vardar, following so closely upon the subjugation of southern Bulgaria
and the completion of the Thracian conquest, gave to Murad a
preponderant position in the Balkan peninsula. The Byzantine emperor and
the Bulgarian and Serbian princes were his tributaries. Wallachia,
Bosnia, Albania, Epirus, Thessaly, Attica and the Peloponnesus were now
on the confines of the Ottoman Empire, and menaced by Ottoman invasion.
In Europe, Murad was credited with having the intention of invading
Hungary. It was reported that he had made an alliance with the Tartars
of Russia to attack Hungary. The Tartars were to cross the Carpathians
by way of Moldavia into Transylvania, while Murad was to work his way up
the valley of the Danube.[344] Murad may have dreamed of such a project,
just as he had thought of making a supreme effort to enter
Constantinople after his first Thracian campaign. But, if he did, he was
deterred by the same well-grounded fear of moving too fast. Ten years
before he had refrained from committing a fatal error. He would continue
to make haste slowly. The early Osmanlis were not raiders. They were
empire-builders. They succeeded because they never forgot that their
greatest problem was that of assimilation. When they extended their
conquests beyond the area of possible assimilation, the period of decay
automatically commenced.
The decade following the Macedonian campaign of 1371-2 was spent in
ottomanizing southern Bulgaria and eastern Macedonia, in completing the
assimilation of Thrace, in reorganizing the army, and in a rearrangement
of the system of distributing the timarets or military fiefs. Royal
domains were created, and lands were set aside for the support of the
mosques and other religious institutions in the form of inalienable
endowments (_vakufs_).
The only move of Murad against the Hungarians was to send five thousand
archers, upon the request of the Senate, to help the Venetians in their
war against Louis.[345]
After the Macedonian campaign, Murad turned his attention once more to
Byzantium. John, when he returned from his unsuccessful trip to Rome,
placated Murad by sending his third son, Theodore, to serve in the
Ottoman army. In 1373, John, passing over Andronicus, raised Manuel to
the imperial purple as co-emperor. The disloyalty of his eldest son in
the question of the emperor’s ransom from his Venetian creditors made it
natural that John should have selected Manuel to rule with him.
John was not wrong in his estimate of the character of Andronicus. The
disappointed prince entered into a conspiracy with Saoudji, son of
Murad, who had been entrusted with the command of the Thracian army
while his father was occupied in Anatolia. John and Manuel, according to
some accounts, were also in the field with Murad. So the moment was
propitious. The two sons raised the standard of revolt against their
fathers.[346] Murad, who hated his own son and feared him, crossed
immediately into Thrace. The army which was supporting the cause of the
young princes abandoned them, and the rebels fled to shut themselves up
in Demotika.[347]
Faced with starvation, the inhabitants of Demotika opened the gates of
their city to Murad. He exacted a most atrocious vengeance. The garrison
were bound hand and foot and thrown into the river. The young Osmanlis
and Greeks who had been led astray by the princes, were put to death.
Wherever possible Murad compelled fathers to act as executioners of
their sons. He set the example by tearing out Saoudji’s eyes, and then
cutting off his head.[348]
It has been generally written that Murad intended that the same
punishment should be meted out to Andronicus. For the sake of
appearances, he did order John Palaeologos to have his son’s eyes put
out. But there was no order for execution. John Palaeologos consented to
the blinding of Andronicus and of his grandson and namesake, who was
only five years old.[349] The operation was not successfully performed.
Both Andronicus and his son, even if temporarily blinded, recovered
their eyesight. Some have explained this by stating that they were
healed by a Genoese physician.[350] There is recorded a beautiful story
that Andronicus owed the restoration of his sight to the empress, his
mother, who visited him daily in the tower of Anemas and was prodigal in
her efforts to heal him. He was in despair for some months, until one
day he saw a lizard climbing on a wall.[351]
If Murad had really desired the death or total blindness of Andronicus,
he could easily have secured this result. While punishing his own son,
however, he saw to it that Andronicus escaped the consequences of the
same crime. Here we have a revelation of the far-sightedness and
cold-bloodedness of Murad. He killed his own son, because he feared his
rivalry. He spared the son of John Palaeologos in order to perpetuate
the rivalry between the emperor and his son. To have killed or
incapacitated Andronicus would have been from his view-point an act of
folly rather than of justice; for Andronicus, brilliant, adventurous,
magnetic, was at the same time a worthy exemplar of the name he bore, a
name that stood for the acme of unscrupulous conduct and contempt for
ties of blood. Murad had only to wait, and history would repeat itself.
Internal dissensions in the family of the Palaeologi had made the
fortunes of Orkhan. Murad had no intention of getting rid of Andronicus,
in whom he saw the means of still further enmeshing the Byzantine
emperors.[352]
The Byzantine historians record for the year 1374 another event, which
illustrates the power of Murad over John Palaeologos. Manuel, who had
resumed the government of Salonika, tried to induce the inhabitants of
Serres to recover their liberty by massacring the Ottoman garrison and
the Ottoman colonists. Serres, in spite of its prominent place in recent
Serbian history, was regarded by the Byzantines (as it still is by the
Greeks of to-day) as a city of their compatriots. We have no means of
establishing the grounds upon which Manuel believed it possible to
restore the Byzantine authority in the country between the Struma and
the Vardar. The sequel indicates that it was a wild and unfounded hope
of a desperate man, and shows how thoroughly in two years the Osmanlis
had become masters of the situation in Macedonia.
Murad, warned in time of the project, sent Khaïreddin pasha with a large
army to Serres. The Greeks implicated in the plot were promptly
executed, and Khaïreddin moved against Salonika. At the approach of the
army, Manuel fled by sea to Constantinople. John Palaeologos was so
frightened that he did not dare to receive in the imperial city the
beloved son whom he had raised to the dignity of co-emperorship. Manuel
then went to Lesbos, whose Genoese lord was his uncle by marriage. But
the fear of Murad had reached the Aegaean Sea. The fugitive was turned
away. Staking all upon the issue, Manuel went to Brusa and threw himself
at Murad’s feet. The time was not yet ripe to destroy the Palaeologi.
Murad pardoned Manuel, and sent him back to Constantinople. It was only
after Manuel had presented a letter from Murad, confirming the fact that
forgiveness had been granted, that the emperor of Byzantium dared to
receive his son and heir within the walls of Constantinople.[353]
Pressed by the Venetians, John made in 1375 the mistake of giving them,
in exchange for three thousand ducats and the jewels which had been
pledged for his debts after the visit to Rome, the island of
Tenedos.[354] The strategic importance of Tenedos was so vital that the
Genoese could not allow this island to fall into the hands of their
rivals. It is an axiom as old as history that who holds Tenedos controls
the entrance and exit to the Dardanelles. Until the Black Sea dries up
and the wheat-fields of Russia fail to yield, there will be a ‘question
of the Straits’.
The news of this grant to Venice meant but one thing to the Genoese.
There was feverish activity at Genoa. A fleet was manned, ostensibly for
the purpose of maintaining the Levant colonies against the Turks.[355]
Pope Gregory XI allowed the archbishop of Genoa to raise enormous sums
by questionable means for equipping and increasing the fleet.[356]
Instead of using this fleet to free the Aegaean and the Black Sea from
the ever-increasing Turkish pirates, or to attack the Osmanlis, the
Genoese admiral sailed to Constantinople. Aided by the Genoese of Galata
and by Bayezid, Andronicus had escaped from the tower of Anemas. When
the fleet arrived from Genoa, he gave to its admiral a golden bull,
awarding Tenedos to Genoa.[357] To Murad he offered his sister in
exchange for help.[358] The old story was repeated. After a month’s
siege, Andronicus, by the aid of his Ottoman and Genoese supporters,
entered Constantinople. His father and his two brothers, Manuel and
Theodore, were imprisoned in the Tower of Anemas, where he and his son
had been shut up for two years.[359] The foresight of Murad in regard to
Andronicus was justified.
While Andronicus was besieging Constantinople, John V managed to send
word to the inhabitants of Tenedos to resist the Genoese and give
themselves to the Venetians. If this were not possible, they were to
abandon the island to the Turks rather than allow the Genoese to occupy
it.[360]
After a year’s imprisonment, the emperor, through the wife of his
jailer, succeeded in perfecting with Venetians residing in
Constantinople a plan of escape. But its execution was deferred when
John discovered that his sons, who were confined to separate rooms,
could not be included in the rescue. Later, the efforts of the Venetians
were renewed upon the solemn promise that Tenedos should revert to
Venice. The plot was discovered. The Venetians, availing themselves of
the lucky chance that a Venetian fleet had just arrived in the Golden
Horn from the Black Sea, fled from Constantinople, abandoning John
Palaeologos to his fate.[361] Andronicus IV was solemnly crowned in St.
Sophia sole emperor of Byzantium.
After two more years of imprisonment,[362] John and his sons succeeded
in escaping in June 1379. They got across the Bosphorus, and took refuge
with Bayezid, who was again watching the course of events at Scutari.
Murad, still playing the game of pitting father against son, drove a
hard bargain. Andronicus must be pardoned once more, and given the
government of several cities, probably including Salonika.[363] John and
Manuel, as a price for freedom and restoration to the imperial throne,
agreed to pay an annual tribute of thirty thousand pieces of gold,
furnish a contingent of twelve thousand soldiers to the Ottoman army,
and surrender to the Osmanlis Philadelphia, the last Byzantine
possession in Asia.[364] When the Philadelphians refused to assent to
this shameful transaction, John and Manuel joined the Ottoman army and
fought against their last Christian subjects in Asia to force upon them
the Moslem yoke.[365]
Thus did Murad hold to the lips of John Palaeologos the cup of
humiliation, nay, more, of degradation, until he drained the last bitter
dregs. We do not need to pass judgement upon John and Manuel. It is
sufficient to say that they drank and did not die!
The question of Tenedos brought Venice and Genoa into their most bitter
conflict of the century. The Visconti of Milan were allied to the
Venetians, while the Hungarians attacked them by land.[366] After
initial successes, the great Venetian admiral Pisani was beaten
decisively in 1379. The Genoese captured Chioggia, and held Venice at
bay in her own lagoons. It was the timely arrival of Charles Zeno and
the fleet from the Levant that saved the Adriatic republic.[367] In
1381, peace was made through the intermediary of Count Amadeo of Savoy,
on condition that the Senate surrendered Tenedos to Amadeo, who
guaranteed to demolish the fortress within two years. It was also a
stipulation of the treaty of Turin that Andronicus IV be recognized as
heir to John V.[368] Did the influence of Murad reach as far as the
peace negotiations in the capital of far-off Savoy? The Count of Savoy
fulfilled his promise. In 1383, the fortifications of Tenedos were
rased, and the inhabitants of the island removed to Crete and
Negropont.[369]
The war over Tenedos had kept open the Straits, but it helped Murad in
an inestimable degree to tighten the grip of the Osmanlis upon Thrace
and Macedonia. The Italian republics thought no more of driving the
Osmanlis out of Europe. From now on until they themselves see their
possessions wrested from them and their commerce in the Levant ruined by
the successors of Murad, the Venetians and Genoese are suitors for
favours at the door of the tent of the Moslem conqueror.
XI
While the struggle between the Palaeologi and the Venetian war with
Genoa and Hungary were strengthening Murad’s position in Europe, he
began to turn his attention, for the first time since the expedition
against Angora at the beginning of his reign, to the expansion of
Ottoman authority in Asia Minor. The antipathy of the South Slavs for
the Hungarians, the anarchy among the Serbians, the lack of leadership
among the Bulgarians, and the civil strife in the Byzantine imperial
family made the period from 1376 to 1381 peculiarly appropriate for
initiating a movement against the emirates on the confines of his own
state. Murad felt for the moment secure in Macedonia and Thrace. The
inhabitants of the conquered countries could do nothing. There were no
prospects of a crusade. Through the rapid increase of the Ottoman race
during the first fifteen years in Europe, and through the vassalage of
the Christian princes, which compelled them to furnish contingents for
war, Murad now had money and soldiers to confront his nearer Anatolian
rivals.
In 1360, after the capture of Angora and the defeat of the Galatian
village chiefs,[370] Murad did not lose his head. He was wise enough to
fear an attack on Kermian. Now he had only to threaten, thanks to the
prestige and actual power he had gained in Europe. The emir of Kermian
was too prudent to risk a war with the son of the rival whom he had
despised. In order to preserve his independence and at the same time his
pride, he agreed to give his daughter in marriage to Bayezid. The
territories which Murad coveted, and was ready to try to take by force,
went with her as her marriage portion. It was a munificent dot. The
western and northern part of Kermian became Ottoman. The most important
city in the new territory was Kutayia, the ancient Cotýaeum, a strategic
point of great value. Its remarkable citadel of countless towers is
still standing.
The marriage of the emir of Kermian’s daughter to Bayezid was celebrated
at Brusa with much splendour. For the first time we hear of the Osmanlis
interested in matters of court and luxury. The simple warriors, who had
known nothing but the village council and the camp fire, were becoming
accustomed to the more formal and more complex life of the Greek cities.
With every victory and every extension of sovereignty, with every
addition to the army and to the body of civilian officials, the distance
between the sovereign and his people was widened. The ceremonial evolved
by the Ottoman court was that of Byzantium; the customs of the higher
classes, who were just beginning to realize their self-made rank, were
Byzantine, even to the veiling of women.[371] The Osmanlis had not yet
come into touch with the Arabs or Egyptians. If they received anything
from the Persians, it was by way of Constantinople.
The Ottoman occupation of Kutayia was a grave blow to the security of
the emirates of Tekke and Hamid. The emir of Hamid saw the hopelessness
of a struggle. He compounded with his pride by ‘selling’ to Murad, in
1377, the territory between Tekke, Kermian, and Karamania. Several
cities, including Sparta and Kara-Agatch, became Ottoman, but most
important of all, Ak Sheïr, which brought the Osmanlis to the frontier
of Karamania.
The purchase of this important territory extended the Ottoman state
south to the border of Tekke. In 1378, Murad made his only conquest by
arms from a rival emir in Asia. He invaded Tekke, and annexed the
districts at the south and south-west of the lake region. But he did not
cross the mountains to the Mediterranean, so the emir of Tekke still
retained Adalia, and Alaya was undisturbed.
For three years Murad devoted his energies to the pacification and
assimilation of these slices of Kermian, Hamid and Tekke. But none of
the three principalities had been extinguished. And Sarukhan, Aïdin and
Menteshe were untouched. There was still much to be accomplished in
western Asia Minor. But Murad preferred to return to Adrianople. He
would increase his power and prestige in Europe, recruit his armies in
the Balkans, and then come once more into Anatolia.
XII
To assure to the Osmanlis their preponderant position in the Balkan
peninsula, the possession of three cities was necessary. The capture of
Sofia meant the extension of Ottoman sovereignty over Bulgaria to the
Danube. Nish was the key to Serbia. Monastir was indispensable, if the
Osmanlis intended to be more than raiders west of the Vardar.
In 1380, Murad ordered the advance to the Vardar. Istip was captured,
and colonized in the same thorough way as had been done at Drama and
Serres. A large army under Timurtash crossed the Vardar, took Monastir
by assault through the marshes, and pushed north to Prilep.[372]
Monastir and Prilep became frontier fortresses of the empire. The
conquest of Macedonia was now complete. These cities were excellent
bases of operation against the Albanians to the west and the Epirotes to
the south-west.
During the reign of Murad, the Osmanlis did not attempt a subjugation
of Albania and Epirus. They were, however, invited into these countries
by native princes.
Thomas, despot of Janina, used Ottoman mercenaries against the Souliotes
in 1382.[373] Two years later, after the assassination of Thomas, the
Albanians besieged Janina with Ottoman aid.[374] The civil war that
arose around the widow of Thomas prepared the way for the Osmanlis to
extend their rule to the Gulf of Arta.
In 1385, Khaïreddin pasha, who had occupied Okrida, the ancient
ecclesiastical seat of the Bulgarians, a day’s journey west of Monastir,
was invited by Charles Thopia, lord of Durazzo, to aid him in his war
against Balsa, the most powerful Frankish prince of Albania. Khaïreddin
was glad of the opportunity afforded by this overture. He crossed the
mountains to Elbasan, and then turned southward to meet Balsa. The first
battle of the Osmanlis in Albania was fought in the salt-wastes of
Savra, on the left bank of the river Devol. The Osmanlis faced fighting
men who were fully their equals in courage, in resourcefulness, in
strength, and in willingness to engage in a hand-to-hand struggle to
death. The issue was long in doubt, and the victory costly. Balsa and
his ally and guest, Ivanitch, son of krai Vukasin, were killed.[375] The
Osmanlis gained one important result from this battle. Albanian
renegades joined their army in great numbers.[376] From that day to this
the Albanian element in the Ottoman army, especially among its officers,
has been a source of strength which cannot be over-estimated.
It is doubtful if the Osmanlis withdrew from Albania, even temporarily,
after the battle of Savra; for in 1388 the princess of Valona (Avlona)
was so hard pressed by the Osmanlis that she put her domains under the
protection of Venice.[377]
In northern Albania, the invaders captured Croia and Scutari in 1386.
Scutari was given back by Murad in exchange for the addition of a member
of the ruling family of Zenta to his harem. From Croia, also, the
Osmanlis withdrew. Murad did not want to excite and alarm Venice at the
moment when Philippe de Mézières was preaching so vigorously and
successfully a new crusade.[378]
The plain in which four tributaries join the Isker is the very heart of
the Balkan peninsula, almost equidistant from the Adriatic, the Aegaean,
and the Black Sea. Here the three great ranges of the West Balkan, the
Central Balkan, and the Rhodope Mountains converge, and three important
rivers find their source. The Struma flows south through Macedonia, the
Isker north-east through a canyon of the Balkans into the Danube, and
the Nisava north-west into the Morava. In the middle of the southern
border of this plain, under the shadow of a lofty mountain, lies Sofia.
The way to Sofia had been opened by the battle of Samakov. But its
occupation was not the next logical step to Murad until the valleys of
the Vardar and the Struma had been conquered. The occupation of Sofia
was a temptation splendidly resisted in 1371. In 1381 it was a
necessity. For it opened the path to trans-Balkan Bulgaria and to
Serbia, and Murad was now ready to extend his conquest to the Danube by
way of the Isker and the Morava.
The Slavic chronicles are silent concerning the fall of Sofia. From the
late Ottoman accounts, it would seem that the city was intermittently
besieged for several years. Then a young Osmanli, who had entered the
city as refugee, and had become the confidant and falconer of its
commandant, betrayed him. He urged his master in a chase some distance
in front of his followers, and fell upon him in a mountain gorge. The
commandant was bound to his horse, and taken a prisoner to Ishtiman.
Indje Balaban, son of the general of Osman who had besieged Brusa for
ten years, brought his army from Philippopolis, and paraded the
commandant, garrotted, under the walls of Sofia. The Bulgarians,
discouraged and despairing of aid, surrendered.[379] We can be certain
neither of the name of the Bulgarian commandant nor of the date of the
surrender. But it was probably in 1385.[380] Bulgaria up to the main
Balkan range was now Ottoman territory.
The fall of Nish, in the summer of 1386, marked the next extension of
Murad’s empire.[381] The Serbians did not yield without a struggle, as
the Bulgarians had done. Nish was taken by assault. Lazar secured peace
only by increasing the amount of his tribute and adding one thousand
cavaliers to his contingent in the Ottoman army.[382]
Nish was sixteen days by carriage from Constantinople. Murad was now
master of four-fifths of the great Roman highway from Belgrade to the
Bosphorus; for Tchorlu, Demotika, Adrianople, Philippopolis, Ishtiman,
Sofia, and Nish were in his hands. Nish was also the point where the
road from Belgrade to Salonika turned southward. Practically all but the
last day’s journey of the road across the Balkan peninsula from
Constantinople to Durazzo on the Adriatic was Ottoman territory. In Asia
Minor, Murad held the ancient highway from Constantinople to Trebizond
as far as Angora, and the road which the pilgrims and Crusaders,
Jerusalem-bent, had travelled as far as Ak Sheïr. From Angora to Nish
took twenty-five days; from Constantinople to Durazzo seventeen
days.[383] Twenty-five years before, when Murad came to the
chieftainship of the Osmanlis, the Ottoman dominions could have been
traversed in any direction in three days.
XIII
The treaty concluded between the Byzantines and Genoese in 1386 affords
a striking illustration of Murad’s power after the Nish campaign. This
treaty, whose text has been preserved, was signed by John and Andronicus
Palaeologos, the podesta of Pera, and the Genoese ambassador. John
Palaeologos bound himself to live in peace with his son Andronicus, and
to move his army against all the enemies of Genoa ‘except Morat bey and
his Turks’. The Genoese in turn promised to defend Constantinople
‘against all enemies of whatever nationality except the said Morat bey
and his Turks, who acted according to the will of the said Morat bey’!
Throughout the treaty, Murad is carefully excepted on both sides.[384]
Genoa made a formal treaty with Murad in 1385. Favours were granted to
the Osmanlis who did business in Pera, in return for liberty to Genoese
merchants to reside and conduct business in the states of Murad. The
treaty recalls the friendship of the Genoese for Orkhan, and speaks of
Murad as ‘the magnificent and powerful lord of lords, Moratibei, grand
admiral[385] and lord of the admirals of Turchie’.[386] But in the very
next year Genoa secretly joined an offensive league with Cyprus, Scio
(Chios) and Mytilene ‘against that Turk, son of unrighteousness and
evil, and also of the Holy Cross Morat bey, and his sect, who are
attempting so grievously to attack the Christian race’.[387]
In the first year of Murad’s reign, the Venetian energy had become so
sapped by prosperity and luxury that the Senate passed a sumptuary
law.[388] The recent triumph over Genoa had given them a belief in
their invincibility. Their self-sufficiency, and the growing
disinclination to lay aside the pen and ledger for the sword and shield,
were alarming symptoms of decay. The lesson of the Genoese at Chioggia
was needed to teach the Venetians that the struggle for existence never
ceases.
In spite of their vital interest in the development of the Levant, and
the power that their wealth gave them in a generation when fighting
strength could be purchased so easily, Venice made no effort to oppose
the progress of Ottoman conquest. On the contrary, in 1368, long before
an invasion of Albania was imminent, the Senate negotiated with the
Osmanlis for the reddition of Scutari. This project was again taken up
in 1384, in a tentative way, during negotiations to fix the
customs-duties of Venetian merchant-vessels.[389] Following the example
of Ragusa and Genoa, Venice concluded, in 1388, a commercial treaty with
Murad.[390]
The traffic of the Italian republics with the Moslems had been denounced
by Gregory X in 1272, by Boniface VIII in 1299, by Urban V in 1366, and
by Gregory XI in 1372.[391] In vain the popes exhorted; in vain they
threatened interdict and excommunication; in vain they held up to
execration the abominable slave traffic. Trade interests alone decided
the policies of the maritime cities. Their citizens never hesitated to
cut each other’s throats for the opportunity of selling goods. To them
the crusades were a purely commercial proposition. More than once the
archives of Venice reveal the approval of the Senate upon the action of
merchants who warned Moslem princes of the crusaders’ intentions.
Guillaume d’Adam declared with reason that the Saracens maintained their
supremacy in the Holy Land and Egypt through the support of the traders,
who furnished them with Christian slaves to keep up their armies.[392]
Genoa passed laws in 1315 and in 1340 against the slave traffic of the
Black Sea,[393] but these laws were never enforced.[394]
Venice and Genoa turned a deaf ear to papal remonstrances and to papal
appeals for aid in crusades against the Osmanlis. For the sake of
preserving their commerce, they flattered Murad, and aided him,
indirectly at least, to subjugate the Christians of the Levant. Their
children of the third and fourth generation paid to the descendants of
Murad the penalty of their greed. They lost their commerce in trying to
save it.
XIV
It was not until 1387 that Murad believed himself strong enough to
measure arms with Karamania. His son-in-law, Alaeddin, whose name is
reminiscent of the earlier glory of Konia, was emir of the most powerful
state in Anatolia. The Ottoman historians have represented Alaeddin’s
resistance of the encroachment of the Osmanlis, and his defiance of
Murad, as rebellion, and have been blindly followed in this by most of
the European historians. Such a conception of the conflict between the
Osmanlis and the Karamanlis is far from the truth. There is no record of
when and how Karamania had become subject to Murad. In fact, up to 1387,
Murad had not yet extended his sovereignty over all of Tekke and Hamid,
the states which bordered Karamania on the west.
Neither Alaeddin himself nor his predecessors had ever acknowledged the
suzerainty of the house of Osman. From the standpoint of the
Karamanians, the Ottoman emir was not even _primus inter pares_ of the
Turkish princes in Anatolia. Osman had probably not been known by name
to the founder of the house of Karaman. Orkhan never came into direct
contact with the Karamanlis. Murad, at the beginning of his reign, had
indirectly gained an advantage over the emir of Karaman in the
successful issue of his expedition against the Phrygian chiefs and the
capture of Angora. Fifteen years later his accessions of territory in
Kermian, Hamid, and Tekke brought him into rivalry with Alaeddin. But it
was the prestige and power gained by Murad in European conquests that
made him a rival to be reckoned with. The first acknowledgement of his
growing strength was the marriage alliance between the houses of these
two emirs. Alaeddin, however, did not by this marriage constitute
himself a vassal of his father-in-law. The letters of Murad to Alaeddin
in the collection of Feridun are couched in terms of equality.
Murad rallied his army at Kutayia for the first great Ottoman campaign
in Asia. He could not muster enough Osmanlis to undertake so formidable
a feat as the invasion of Karamania, and had to rely upon large
contingents of Greeks and Serbians, who were sent to him, in accordance
with their conventions, by his vassals, the emperor John and the kral
Lazar.[395] The Balkan soldiers, under the command of Bayezid, formed
the left wing of the Ottoman army.
Battle was joined in the great plain before Konia, which has so often
been the scene of Ottoman triumphs and reverses. The Ottoman historians
declare that Alaeddin was defeated, largely through the bravery of
Timurtash, and represent the battle of Konia as a decisive victory,
which ‘put down the rebellion’. According to them, Alaeddin ‘sued for
peace’. Murad ‘forgave’ him, because he was moved by the tearful
pleadings of his daughter, Alaeddin’s wife.[396]
But the net result of the costly expedition was the reconciliation of
the two emirs. The only result recorded by the Ottoman historians is
that Alaeddin kissed Murad’s hands! Murad withdrew to Kutayia without
annexing any portion of the Karamanian emirate, without booty, and
without promise either of tribute or military contingents for the
European wars. Had Murad actually accomplished more than merely holding
his own in the battle of Konia, the campaign would not have ended so
profitlessly. Granting the Ottoman victory, Murad’s conduct after the
battle is inconsistent with his whole life and character. We are
compelled to discard the story of a decisive victory. It must be that
Murad, who had been able to reduce to vassalage the Byzantines, the
Bulgarians, and the Serbians, found himself unable, even with the help
of his European allies, to break the power of this rival Anatolian emir.
XV
During the Karamanian campaign, Murad adopted the policy of treating
non-combatants in a friendly fashion. Strict orders were given to
refrain from violence and looting. Murad hoped to win the Karamanlis by
kindness, and to pave the way for a later assimilation. It was the first
campaign undertaken against fellow Moslems. The Serbian contingent, who
cared nothing for the success of this policy, and who claimed that they
had been promised booty in return for their services, did not obey the
order. A number of them were summarily executed.[397]
When the survivors returned to their homes in the spring of 1388, they
complained bitterly of the way they had been treated, and declared that
service in the Ottoman army, for the Christian all risk and no gain, was
nothing less than a slavery leading to death. This discontent gave Lazar
the opportunity for which he had long been looking. He decided to profit
by the resentment of the Serbians against Murad,[398] and make a supreme
effort to free Serbia from the menace of the Ottoman yoke, which had
grown very real since the capture of Nish.
The Slavs of upper Serbia and of Bosnia realized the imminence of an
Ottoman invasion, and they were now ready--or at least they appeared to
be ready--to rally around Lazar. Up to this time the Serbians had never
recognized Lazar as the leader of the race.
The pan-Serbian alliance was made possible by the adhesion of Tvrtko,
kral of Bosnia. He had come into prominence after the battle of Cernomen
as a supporter of Lazar against the sons of Vukasin and other Serbian
chieftains who were dissatisfied with the election of Lazar. But in
return for his aid, he got under his control a large part of upper
Serbia, including Milesevo, which was the burial-place of St. Sava,
apostle to the Serbians. In 1376, he crowned himself ‘king of Bosnia and
Serbia’ on the tomb of St. Sava, placing upon his head the two crowns,
and changing his name to Stephen. Neither Louis of Hungary nor Lazar was
consulted by Tvrtko, and he took no measures to secure their assent to
his pretensions. After his coronation, he conquered Cattaro, and fought
successfully with Balza of Albania.[399]
In 1383 Tvrtko had become so powerful on the Dalmatian coast that the
Senate recognized him as ‘king of Serbia, Bosnia and the Riviera’, and
bestowed upon him the privilege of Venetian citizenship.[400] It was
evidently the intention of Venice to favour Tvrtko as an opponent to
Louis of Hungary, who had himself taken in 1382 the title of ‘king of
Serbia, Dalmatia and Bulgaria’.[401] Venice lost her grip upon or
interest in the east coast of the Adriatic for a few years immediately
following the treaty of Turin. We have already seen how in 1384 the
Senate professed a willingness to treat with the Osmanlis on the basis
of giving up Scutari. In 1385 they became indifferent to currying
further the favour of Tvrtko, and sent an embassy to press him for the
payment of money due to Venice.[402] Tvrtko continued to consolidate his
position on the Dalmatian coast, until the capture of Nish influenced
him to aid Lazar against the Osmanlis.
It was not a moment too soon. An Ottoman army had already crossed the
Vardar and was marching forward for the invasion of Bosnia. Thirty
thousand Serbians and Bosnians under the command of Tvrtko and Lazar met
the invading army at Plochnik, in the valley of the Toplika. Of twenty
thousand Osmanlis scarcely one-fifth escaped death or captivity.[403]
The Bosnians successfully opposed two other Ottoman armies at Rudnik and
Biletchia.[404]
A delirium of joy spread through the Slavic population of the Balkans at
the news of the battle of Plochnik. The uninterrupted chain of thirty
years of Ottoman victories had been broken. The slavery and horror of
military service with the Osmanlis, price of their vassalage, so vividly
depicted by the survivors of the Karamanian campaign, had made the Slavs
desperate. This victory, following closely upon the moral revolt against
the Osmanlis, gave them hope. The South Slavs are like children in the
extremes of their emotions. Tears to laughter--laughter to tears: easily
despairing, as easily hopeful, and from as little cause. The slightest
reverse brings distrust in their ability to cope with forces that have
once successfully opposed them. Slight success brings overwhelming
confidence, and leads to colossal mistakes of judgement. With this trait
of character is coupled an intuitive distrust of one’s neighbour, of the
disinterestedness of his motives, and an intuitive resentment of ‘the
other fellow’ doing something better than you do it. This makes
impossible solidarity and _esprit de corps_. The South Slavic character
explains the series of events which brought the Serbians to their final
and irretrievable disaster.
Around Lazar the Serbian nobles rallied as they had never rallied
before. Kral Tvrtko of Bosnia, George Kastriota of Albania, and the
minor princes of Albania and Serbia joined in an alliance against the
Osmanlis. The two remaining successors of Alexander of Bulgaria, Sisman
and Ivanko, son of Dobrotich, threw off their allegiance to Murad, and
promised contingents for the common struggle. The prince of Wallachia
assured Lazar of the co-operation of the Rumanians.
Venice, fearing lest Murad fall upon the Peloponnesus to seek vengeance
for the defeat of Plochnik, tried to form a league of all the Greek and
Frankish lords in the Morea and central Greece.[405] As far as one can
judge from the records, the effort of Venice was an intention rather
than an action. It did not get beyond the paper stage. The Senate gave
to the Slavic alliance no encouragement more substantial than words. On
the other hand, some of the border nobles of the Hungarian banats, of
their own volition, informed Lazar of their intention to co-operate in
an offensive movement against the Osmanlis.
XVI
Murad did not set his army in motion against the Serbians immediately
after the disaster at Plochnik. There was none of that feverish haste
which had characterized his movements when he received the news of the
Serbian and Hungarian crusade in 1363. For while the victory had aroused
in the Balkan Christians a determination that they must drive the
Osmanlis out of Europe, and a feeling that they could accomplish this
end, its immediate result had been merely to repel the projected Ottoman
invasion of Bosnia. Ali pasha disposed of sufficient forces to hold the
conquests that had already been made. Murad had come to know the people
with whom he was dealing. It was not so much to recruit his own army as
to give the allies time to fall out with each other that Murad remained
in Asia during the early months of 1388. To strike in the first flush of
enthusiasm and buoyant hope would have brought him face to face with a
united enemy. If he waited, he knew from past experience with the Balkan
princes that the poison of jealousy would permeate the ranks of his
ostensibly united enemies. The Osmanlis never made a mistake of
judgement in dealing with Balkan alliances until the autumn of 1912.
Far from planning an offensive movement against the Serbians, Murad
allowed Evrenos of Yanitza to lead a band of Ottoman mercenaries into
the Morea, at the invitation of Theodore Palaeologos, to support the
authority of the Byzantine Empire against the Frankish barons.[406] At
the same time he ordered Ali pasha to cross the Balkans into northern
Bulgaria.
Ali pasha started from Adrianople in the spring of 1388 with thirty
thousand men to complete the conquest of Bulgaria. He crossed the
Balkans by the pass north of Aïtos, which has ever since been called by
the Osmanlis Nadir Derbend from the neighbouring town of Nadirkeuy.[407]
Provadia was taken by surprise in the night. Shuman and the villages
around it were next conquered. After an unsuccessful attack upon Varna,
the Osmanlis retraced their steps through Provadia and Shuman, following
the line of the modern railway from Varna to Sofia. Tirnovo, the ancient
capital of Bulgaria, capitulated after a short struggle.
Sisman withdrew to the Danube through the valley of the Osma, and shut
himself up in the fortress of Nicopolis. Owing to the ease of
provisioning from the river side, it was impossible to starve him out.
Ali pasha was compelled to call upon Murad, who had just crossed over
from Asia to Thrace. When Murad arrived before Nicopolis, Sisman sued
for peace. The conditions of Murad, that he pay the tribute due from the
previous year and allow an Ottoman garrison to occupy the fortress of
Drster as gage of future good conduct, were gladly accepted.
No sooner had Murad started southward than Sisman decided upon a final
desperate resistance. He refused to give up Drster. But he had forgotten
that Ali pasha was master of Shuman and the route to Varna. The Osmanlis
took Drster by storm. Many villages along the Danube between Rustuk and
Nicopolis fell into the hands of the Osmanlis. Ali pasha besieged Sisman
for a second time in Nicopolis. The revelation of his own weakness and
of the strength of the Osmanlis was a crushing blow to Sisman. He
surrendered without conditions, and was taken, with his wife and
children, to Murad’s camp. For reasons which the chroniclers do not
indicate, Sisman was able to secure forgiveness and restoration to his
former position as vassal prince of Bulgaria. But the Osmanlis were now
installed in north-central Bulgaria up to the Danube River. Shuman and
Nicopolis were Ottoman fortresses. Sisman had been rendered impotent to
give effective aid in the great alliance.[408]
XVII
Not all the Christians were loyal to the cause of Balkan freedom. In
their conquest of the Balkan peninsula, it is remarkable that the
Osmanlis never fought a battle without the help of allies of the faith
and blood of those whom they were putting under the Moslem yoke. At the
beginning of this chapter, it has been shown that there is no historical
basis for the assertion that the Osmanlis conquered the Balkan states by
the use of the janissaries. But they did have Christian aid of a far
more powerful kind than the janissaries could have given them. The old
fiction of the janissaries won for the Balkan people the sympathies of
western Europe. The truth concerning the Christian aid which the Moslem
conquerors received alienates rather than wins our sympathies.
When, in the spring of 1389, Murad found himself ready to exact
vengeance for Plochnik, and started from Bulgaria on his punitive
expedition, he was joined by Constantine of Kustendil, by the Serbian
Dragash, to whom he had given Serres as fief, and even by the sons of
Vukasin, the Serbian kral who had been killed in 1371 at Cernomen.[409]
Balsa, prince of Zenta (upper Albania), postponed his march to join the
allies, and entered secretly into correspondence with Murad through a
Serbian nobleman in the Ottoman camp. Lazar knew of this treachery. He
knew also that some of his own lieutenants had in all probability
arranged to sell him out to the Ottoman emir.[410]
Kossovapol, the plain of the blackbirds, is the name given to the valley
of the Sitnika River (an upper tributary of the Morava) west of Pristina
and south of Mitrovitza.[411] Here the decisive battle for Serbian
independence was fought on June 20, 1389.[412]
Serbian chronicles state that Murad had enjoined upon his soldiers that
they should neither destroy nor sack the rich castles, villages, and
cities of this region after the battle. Only four castles in all were
destroyed.[413] This command shows that Murad was confident of the
outcome. He was fighting for the possession of this country, for the
wealth and the prestige that it would give him. He had no intention of
destroying what he knew would be his to enjoy, nor did he desire to
alienate the Serbian peasantry by unnecessary harshness. Here, as
elsewhere, new Osmanlis rather than Ottoman subjects were the
_desiderata_: they could be won only by kindness. Since the clemency of
the Osmanlis in dealing with the vanquished after the battle is frankly
recorded by the Serbians themselves, we cannot doubt that the wise and
far-seeing provisions of the conqueror were carried out.
Of Kossova much has been written. It was the culminating event in that
legendary period of Serbian history which had begun fifty years before
with the exploits of Stephen Dushan. Lazar, Serbian chieftain with no
long line of royal ancestors behind him, with no great weight of
authority among his contemporaries, who began his career by craven
submission to Murad and, after eighteen years in which no deed to his
credit is recorded, survived a crushing defeat to be executed on the
field of battle--this is the Charlemagne of Serbian poetry. On the
anniversary of Kossova, the Serbians pray for his soul. As a saint, he
gets many more candles at his shrine than his namesake of Bethany who
was raised from the dead. Such is legend in history. But what amazes one
is the curious fact that the very folksongs that glorify Saint Lazar and
lament Kossova reveal a frank and true picture of the events, and prove
how little warrant there is for the legend!
The Serbians despaired of their cause before the battle. The enormous
number of the enemy dismayed them.[414] Rumours of treachery were
current in the allied camp. Their lack of courage, and the spirit of
distrust of each other’s good faith, is strikingly voiced in the oration
of Lazar at a banquet the evening before the battle. He pleaded for a
courage and confidence which he himself did not feel. He openly accused
his son-in-law, Milosh Obravitch, of treason. Gloom and hopelessness had
settled over the Serbian camp, reflected from leaders to the common
soldiery. The battle was already lost. For victory is never won by those
who feel that they are going to lose.[415]
The battle was begun by the Osmanlis. Murad sent forward an advance
guard of two thousand archers.[416] The allies responded with a charge
in which the left wing of the Ottoman army was broken through by Lazar.
For a while the issue seemed in doubt. Bayezid held out against the
impetuosity of the Serbians, but the Osmanlis made no attempt to take
the offensive. At this critical juncture, when the battle was by no
means decided, Vuk Brankovitch, another son-in-law of Lazar, quietly
withdrew from the field with twelve thousand men. This desertion, which
had probably been arranged for with Murad, so weakened the Serbians that
they broke and fled. Lazar and many of his leading noblemen, and
thousands of his soldiers, were taken prisoners. It was not a fight to
the bitter end.[417]
Murad won the battle of Kossova at the cost of his own life. From the
story which Clavijo de Gonzáles heard fifteen years later, one might
infer that Murad was killed in the course of the battle, and that the
fighting was renewed around his body.[418] It was then that Bayezid cut
down Lazar with his own sword. Pray declared that the two sovereigns
were mortally wounded in a personal combat.[419] The Ottoman historians
believed that Murad met his death when walking across the field after
the battle. A wounded Serbian soldier, who was believed to be dead, rose
with a supreme effort to his knees and thrust his sword into Murad as he
passed.
According to the Serbian songs, whose testimony the Byzantine historians
corroborate, and whose story has been followed by some Osmanlis as well,
Murad was assassinated after the battle, or perhaps while the battle was
in progress, by Milosh Obravitch. Stung by the unjust accusation of
treason in the speech of Lazar on the eve of the battle,[420] Milosh
determined to prove his loyalty beyond any question. He got through the
Ottoman ranks as a deserter, of whom there must have been many on that
fatal day. His claim of high rank, which was attested by his princely
bearing, secured for him an audience with Murad. When he was face to
face with the emir, he plunged his dagger into the destroyer of his
country’s liberties. It is a commentary on the Serbian character that
this questionable act has been held up to posterity as the most saintly
and heroic deed of national history.
In the seventeenth century it was believed, and this belief has been
reproduced as a fact by some modern writers on the Ottoman Empire, that
the custom of holding a foreign ambassador’s arms when he entered the
presence of the sultan, originated from a regulation to prevent the
recurrence of such a crime.[421] Like many other Ottoman customs,
however, this consistorial ceremony is found among the usages of the
Byzantine court,[422] and has persisted in some oriental courts to the
present day. It has been explained on the ground that ‘a stranger before
the sovereign is so overwhelmed by the effulgence of his rays that he
cannot stand without support’.[423]
The statements of the numbers engaged in the battle of Kossova are so
conflicting that it is impossible to determine how many men took part in
the action, or which side was the stronger. The Serbian folksongs dwell
upon the tremendous number of the enemy, while the Ottoman historians
report that the Osmanlis mustered so few in comparison with the reported
strength of the Serbians that there was serious question before the
battle of the advisability of taking so great a risk as to engage a foe
whose numerical advantage was so marked. Including the prisoners, who
were massacred when Murad’s death was learned by the soldiers, the
Serbians calculated their loss at seventy-seven thousand killed, while
only twelve thousand of the Osmanlis fell. One important fact we do
know. The loss of life during the battle and subsequent massacre on the
part of the Serbian nobility was so great that the nation, for the third
time within thirty years, found itself without leaders.
Tvrtko hurried away from Kossova so fast that he did not realize how
overwhelming had been the defeat. In fact, when he learned of the death
of Murad, he wrote to Florence announcing the glorious victory won under
his leadership, and the death of the arch enemy of Christendom.[424] The
Florentines, therefore, celebrated the news of Kossova with a _Te Deum_
in the cathedral. Either this perverted account also reached France, or
too great significance was placed upon the death of Murad, for Charles
VI went to Notre Dame to render thanks to God in all solemnity for what
had happened at Kossova![425] The Serbians themselves were not deceived.
To them, Kossova was the death-knell to independence. The Hungarians,
also, awoke immediately to a sense of the danger that threatened them.
XVIII
For thirty years Murad had guided the destinies of the Osmanlis with a
political sagacity surpassed by no statesman of his age. It is only
because we know so much more of Mohammed the Conqueror and of Soleiman
the Magnificent that Murad has never received his proper place as the
most remarkable and most successful statesman and warrior of the house
of Osman. When we measure the difficulties which confronted him, the
problems which he solved, and the results of his reign, against the
deeds of his more dazzling successors, we see how easily he stands with
them, if not above them. The transformation effected in his lifetime is
one of the most wonderful records in all history. His conquests were to
endure for five centuries, until the Treaty of Berlin, in 1878: some of
them have survived the cataclysm of the recent Balkan wars.
His energy and zeal for fighting, so like his father’s, and yet put to
the test of being extended over a field of action far wider than his
father ever dreamed of, did not flag. He never had a disagreement with
any of his generals or administrators. His system of conquest and of
government, unsupported by tradition or the background of a gradual
growth, fitted every condition for which it had been framed. His
treatment of the Greeks showed superb skill in estimating their
character. Although an infidel and enemy of Christ in the eyes of the
Byzantine ecclesiastics, he handled them so much better than the popes
that he won their sympathies. No more striking proof of his complete
success in a problem of assimilation, at once racial as well as
religious, can be found than the letter of the Orthodox patriarch
written to Pope Urban VI in 1385, in which it is stated that Murad left
to the Church entire liberty of action.[426] In the records of the Greek
patriarchate from 1360 to 1389,[427] one does not find a single instance
of complaint received of ill treatment of the priesthood by the
Osmanlis.
Osman gathered around him a race, Orkhan created a state, but it was
Murad who founded the empire.