son of Ertogrul, was a vassal of the Seljouk Sultan of Roum, who had been
granted a tract in the Phrygian highlands under the condition of military
service against the Greeks. His fief lay in the north-west angle of the
great central plateau of Asia Minor. Behind it lay the rolling country of
hills and uplands already occupied by the Seljouks. Before it were the
Bithynian mountains, with their passes protected by forts, and garrisoned
by local militia, till the day when they were so perversely stripped of
their defenders by the action of Michael Paleologus. Othman, and his
father Ertogrul before him, owned nothing in the hills, nor could they
have pushed on if Michael had not made the way easy for them. But after
1270 the native militia was gone, and the followers of Othman, instead of
having to face an armed population, fighting to protect its own fields,
found to oppose them only inadequate garrisons of regular troops at long
intervals.
Othman’s life covered two series of great events, the disastrous reign of
Andronicus II. at Constantinople, and in Asia Minor the no less disastrous
break-up of the power of his own suzerain, the Sultan of Roum. In 1294,
Gaiaseddin, the last undisputed sovereign of the Seljouk line, fell in
battle against rebels; and in 1307, Alaeddin III., the last prince who
claimed to be supreme Sultan, died in exile. This made Othman an
independent prince; but he did not take the title of Sultan, contenting
himself with the humbler name of Emir.
Othman’s field of operation from 1281 to 1326 was the Byzantine borderland
of Bithynia and Mysia. He was by no means the strongest of the Seljouk
chiefs who made a lodgement within the borders of the empire, and it took
him twenty years before he conquered one large town. His wild horsemen
harried the open sea-coast plain of Bithynia again and again, till at last
the wretched inhabitants emigrated, or acknowledged him as their
sovereign. But the towns, within their strong Roman walls, were
unassailable by the light cavalry which formed his only armed strength.
The siege of Prusa [Broussa], the capital and key of the region, lasted
ten years. The Turks built a chain of forts around it and gradually made
the introduction of provisions more and more difficult, till at last a
large force was required to march out every time that a convoy was
expected. At length the inhabitants could find no advantage in spending
their whole lives in a beleaguered town undergoing slow starvation. Prusa
surrendered in 1326, and Othman heard of the news on his death-bed. The
Turkish frontier now once again touched the Sea of Marmora, which it had
not reached since the Crusaders thrust it back inland in 1097.
The reign of Othman’s son Orkhan, the second Emir of the Ottomans, almost
coincided with that of Andronicus III. All that the one lost the other
gained. Orkhan’s life-work was the completion of the conquest of Bithynia,
which his father had begun. He took Nicomedia in 1327 and Nicaea in 1333,
with all the surrounding territory, so that Andronicus retained nothing
but Chalcedon and the district immediately facing Constantinople beyond
the Bosphorus. Only once did he have to meet the Emperor in pitched
battle; this was at the fight of Pelekanon in 1329. Andronicus was wounded
early in the day, and his army, deprived of its leader went to pieces and
was severely beaten. After his recovery from his wounds the Emperor never
faced the Ottomans again.
After conquering Bithynia, Orkhan subdued his nearest neighbours among the
other Seljouk Emirs, and then turned to organizing his state. This was the
date of the institution of his famous corps of the Janissaries, the first
steady infantry that any Eastern power had ever possessed. He imposed on
his Christian subjects in Mysia and Bithynia a tribute, not of money, but
of male children. The boys were taken over while very young, placed in
barracks, educated in the strictest and most fanatical Moslem code, and
trained to the profession of arms. Having light horse enough and to spare,
Orkhan taught the Janissaries to fight on foot with bow and sabre. They
were well drilled, and moved in compact masses, which for many ages no foe
proved competent to sunder and disperse. So thorough was the physical and
moral discipline to which the Janissaries were subjected, that it was
almost unknown for one of them to turn back from his career and relapse
into Christianity. To keep them firm in their allegiance there acted not
only the military and conventual discipline to which they were subject,
but the dazzling prospect of future greatness. The Ottoman sovereigns made
it their rule to select their generals and governors, their courtiers and
personal attendants from the ranks of the tribute-children. It was
calculated that more than two-thirds of the Grand-Viziers of Turkey, in
the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries, had begun their career
as Janissaries.
The first generation of the “New Soldiery” [for such is the meaning of the
word Janissary] grew up to the military age during the latter half of the
reign of Orkhan, and it was he who first utilized them on the European
shore of the Bosphorus.
Andronicus III. died in 1241, and left his shrunken dominions to the risks
of a minority, for his son and heir, John III., was only nine years of
age. If anything had been wanting to aid in the destruction of the empire,
it was the arrival of such a contingency. The usual troubles soon set in,
and the inevitable civil war was not far off.
[Illustration]
John Cantacuzenus Sitting In State. (_From a Contemporary MS._) (_From
"L’Art Byzantin." Par C. Bayet. Paris, Quantin, 1883._)
The evil spirit of the time was John Cantacuzenus, the prime minister of
the deceased emperor. He was a clever, shifty, intriguing courtier, with a
turn for literature, but had the abilities neither of a general nor of a
statesman. However, he had read the tale of the rise of the Paleologi to
some purpose, and had resolved to imitate the career of Michael VIII. Now,
as in 1258, there was the best of chances for an unscrupulous minister to
make himself first the colleague and then the supplanter of his young
master. Cantacuzenus did his best to repeat the doings of Michael on
Michael’s great-great-grandson. He bribed and intrigued, made himself a
party in the state, and prepared for a _coup d’état_ when the time should
be ripe. Unfortunately for himself, Cantacuzenus was not of the stuff of
which successful usurpers are made. He had his scruples and superstitions,
and showed a fatal habit of procrastination which always led him to act a
day too late. The Empress Dowager, Anne of Savoy, succeeded in raising a
party against him, and when he threw off the mask and declared himself
emperor he found himself unable to seize the capital, though he mustered
an army under its walls. Finding that he was playing a losing game,
Cantacuzenus took the usual step of calling in the national enemy to aid
him. It was for the last time that this was done in Byzantine history, but
never before had the result been so fatal. The usurper summoned to his aid
first Stephen Dushan, the king of the Servians, and a little later the
Turkish princes from across the Aegean—Orkhan the son of Othman, and his
rival, Amour, Emir of Aidin.
These allies kept the cause of John Cantacuzenus from destruction, but it
was by destroying the empire that John had coveted. King Stephen entered
Macedonia and Thrace, and occupied the whole countryside, except
Thessalonica and a few other towns. He then pushed further south,
conquered Thessaly, and made the despot of Epirus do him homage. The
Byzantine government retained little more than the capital, and the
districts round Adrianople and Thessalonica. Most of this country was lost
for ever to the imperial crown, and it seemed as if a Servian domination
in the Balkan Peninsula was about to begin, for Stephen moved south from
Servia, made Uscup in Macedonia his capital, and proclaimed himself
“Emperor of the Servians and Romans.”
It would perhaps have been well for Christendom if Stephen had actually
conquered Constantinople and made an end of the empire. In that case there
would have been a single great power in the Balkan Peninsula, ready to
meet the oncoming assault of the Turks. But Dushan was not strong enough
to take the great city, and to the misfortune of Europe he died in 1355
leaving a realm extending from the Danube to the pass of Thermopylae. But
his young son Urosh was soon assassinated, and the Servian Empire broke up
as rapidly as it had grown together. A dozen princes were soon scrambling
for the remnants of Stephen’s heritage.
The other allies whom John Cantacuzenus called in were the Turks Amour and
Orkhan, and on them he depended far more than on the Servian. He took over
into Thrace a large body of Turkish horse, and allowed them to harry the
country-side and carry away his subjects by thousands, to be sold in the
slave-markets of Smyrna and Broussa. But the depth of John’s degradation
was reached when he gave his daughter Theodora to Orkhan, to be immured in
the Turk’s harem. Thrace was rapidly assuming the aspect of a desert under
the incursions of the Ottoman mercenaries of Cantacuzenus, when after six
years of war the party of the Empress Anne consented to recognize the
usurper as the colleague and guardian of the rightful heir. A hollow peace
was patched up, and the two Johns could take stock of their dilapidated
realm [1347]. The net result of their civil war had been that Macedonia
and Thessaly were in Servian hands, and that Thrace was utterly ruined by
the Turks. There was nothing left that could be called an empire; all that
remained was Constantinople and Adrianople, the town of Thessalonica and
the Byzantine province in the Peloponnesus. Cantacuzenus certainly
deserves a notable place by the side of Isaac and Alexius Angelus, as the
third of the great destroyers of the Eastern Empire.
But his evil work was not yet done. For seven years he ruled in
conjunction with John Paleologus, waging an unsuccessful war against
Servia in the hopes of winning back Dushan’s conquests. But in 1354 the
young emperor, having attained the age of twenty-four, resolved to assert
himself, and took arms to dethrone his guardian. Cantacuzenus resisted,
and sent over to Asia for the troops of his son-in-law Orkhan, who crossed
into Thrace and drove the adherents of the Paleologi out of several
fortresses. But a night surprise from the side of the sea put John
Paleologus in possession of Constantinople, and by a fortunate chance he
got Cantacuzenus himself into his hands. The usurper was, in accordance
with the usual practice, tonsured and placed in a monastery; by
exceptional good fortune he was spared the loss of his eyes, and was able
to spend the remainder of his life in writing a history of his own time.
But it was of little use to sweep away Cantacuzenus while Orkhan’s Turks
were in Thrace. The Ottomans had come as auxiliaries in the war, but they
were resolved to stop as principals. Suleiman, the son of Orkhan, seized
Gallipoli for himself, filled it with Turkish families, and made it a
permanent settlement. This was the first Ottoman foothold in Europe, but
it was not long to remain isolated.
In 1359 Orkhan died, and his successor, Murad I., determined to cross over
into Europe, and try the fortune of his arms. John Paleologus was not a
worse man than his immediate predecessors on the throne, but thanks to
Cantacuzenus he had far less resources than even they had possessed. Two
years of fighting sufficed to put Thrace in the hands of Murad from sea to
sea. A decisive battle in front of Adrianople in 1361 was the finishing
stroke, and the empire became a mere head without a body; its last
home-province had been lopped away, and beyond the walls of Constantinople
no land acknowledged John V. as sovereign save the district of
Thessalonica and the Peloponnesus.
Why Murad I. did not finish the task he had begun, and take Constantinople
itself, it is hard to discern. Its walls were still formidable, and the
Genoese and Venetians could still protect it on the side of the sea. But a
siege pressed firmly to an end must at last have triumphed over the mere
inert resistance of stone and mortar, unsupported by an adequate garrison
within. However, Murad preferred to press on against worthier adversaries
than the weak Paleologus, and spent his life in incessant and successful
wars with the Servians, the Bulgarians, and the Seljouk Emirs of Southern
Asia Minor. In a reign of thirty years he extended his borders to the
Balkans on the north, and annexed large tracts of Seljouk territory from
his brother Emirs in Asia Minor.
John Paleologus was his humble vassal and slave. After a vain attempt to
get help from the Pope, this emperor without an empire resolved to make
what terms he could, and rejoiced when he found that Murad was prepared to
grant him peace. The Turk was a hard master, and rejoiced in giving his
vassal unpalatable tasks. Best remembered among the tribulations of John
is the siege of Philadelphia. That place had preserved a precarious
independence after all the other cities of Byzantine Asia fell into the
hands of the Turkish Emirs. Being far away in the Lydian hills, it lost
touch with Constantinople, and had become a free town. Murad, wishing to
subdue it, compelled John V. and his son Manuel to march in person against
the last Christian stronghold in Asia. The Emperor submitted to the
degradation, and Philadelphia surrendered when it saw the imperial banner
hoisted among the horse-tails of the Turkish pashas above the camp of the
besiegers. The humiliation of the empire could go no further than when the
heir of Justinian and Basil Bulgaroktonos took the field at the behest of
an upstart Turkish Emir, in order to extinguish the last relics of freedom
among his own compatriots.
XXVI. THE END OF A LONG TALE. (1370-1453.)
The tale of the last seventy-five years of the Byzantine Empire is a mere
piece of local history, and no longer forms an important thread in the web
of the history of Christendom. Murad the Turk might have taken
Constantinople in 1370, without altering in any very great measure the
course of events in Eastern Europe during the next century. For after 1370
the empire ceased to exercise its old function of “bulwark of Christendom
against the Ottomite.” That duty now fell to the Servians and Hungarians,
who continued to discharge it for the next hundred and fifty years. The
Paleologi, by their base subservience to the Turk, protracted the life of
the empire long after all justification for its existence had disappeared.
If Constantinople had fallen in 1370, instead of 1453, there are only two
ways in which European history would have been somewhat modified. The
commercial resources of Genoa and Venice would have been straitened before
the appointed time, and ere the Cape route to India enabled Europe to
dispense with the use of Constantinople as half-way house to the East.
And, we may add, the Renaissance would have been shorn of some of its
brilliance in the next century, if the dispersion of the Greeks had taken
place before Italy was quite fitted to receive them and turn their
learning to account. But in other respects it is hard to see that much
harm would have resulted from the fall of Constantinople in the end of the
fourteenth rather than the middle of the fifteenth century.
While Murad I. was conquering the Servians and Bulgarians, John Paleologus
was dragging out a long and unhonoured old age. His reign was protracted
for over half a century, but his later years were much vexed by the
undutiful behaviour of his children. His son Andronicus twice rebelled
against him, and once succeeded in seizing the throne for a short space.
Andronicus allied himself unto Saoudji, a son of Murad I., who plotted a
similar treason against his father the Emir. But Murad easily quelled the
rebellion, put out the eyes of his own son, and sent Andronicus in chains
to John II., bidding him to follow his example. The Emperor did not dare
to disobey, and ordered his son to be blinded. But the operation was so
ineffectually performed that Andronicus retained a measure of sight, and
was even able to venture on a second rebellion against his father.
In consequence of his heir’s unnatural conduct, the aged John determined
to deprive him of his succession, and when he died in 1391, he left the
throne to his second son Manuel, and not to his eldest born. Manuel II.
was above the average of the Paleologi, and showed some signs of capacity,
but of what use was it to a prince whose sole dominions were
Constantinople, Thessalonica, and the Peloponnesus? He had neither
military strength nor money to justify rebellion against the Turk, and
could only wait on the course of events.
There was, however, one moment in Manuel’s life at which the liberation of
the empire from the Ottoman suzerainty appeared possible and even
probable. In 1402, there burst into Asia Minor a great horde of Tartars,
under the celebrated conqueror Timour [Tamerlane]. Sultan Bayezid, the
successor of Murad I., went forth to withstand the invader. But at Angora
in Galatia, he suffered a crushing defeat, and the Ottoman Empire seemed
likely to perish by the sword. Bayezid was captured, his trusty
Janissaries were cut to pieces, his light horsemen scattered to the winds.
The Tartars swarmed all over Asia Minor, occupied Broussa, the Ottoman
capital, and restored to their thrones all the Seljouk Emirs whose
dominions Murad I. had annexed. Bayezid died in captivity, and his sons
began to fight over the remains of his empire: Prince Suleiman seized
Adrianople, Prince Eesa Nicaea, and each declared himself Sultan.
[Illustration]
Manuel Paleologus And His Family. (_From a Contemporary MS._) (_From
"L’Art Byzantin." Par C. Bayet. Paris, Quantin, 1883._)
This was a rare opportunity for Manuel Paleologus: the thieves had fallen
out, and the rightful owner might perchance come again to his own, if he
played his cards well. The control of the Straits was of great importance
to each of the Turkish pretenders, so much so, that Manuel was able to
sell his aid to Suleiman for a heavy price. In order to keep Eesa from
crossing the water, the holder of the European half of the Ottoman realm
ceded to the Emperor Thessalonica, the lower valley of the Strymon, the
coast of Thessaly, and all the seaports of the Black Sea from the mouth of
the Bosphorus up to Varna.
For a moment Manuel once more ruled what might in courtesy be called an
empire, and so long as the Ottomans were occupied in civil war he
contrived to retain his gains. The strife of the sons of Bayezid lasted
ten years: Suleiman was slain by his brother Musa, Eesa by his brother
Mohammed, and the two supplanters continued the war. By all Oriental
analogies their empire ought to have fallen to pieces, for it is very much
easier to build up a new state in the East than to keep together an old
one which is breaking asunder. But Mohammed, the youngest of the sons of
Bayezid, was a man of genius: he triumphed over the last of his brothers,
and united all the remnants of the Ottoman realm that remained. Much had
been lost to the Seljouk Emirs in Asia Minor, and to the Servians and
Manuel Paleologus in Europe, but the rest was back in Mohammed’s hands by
A.D. 1421. Manuel had very luckily cast in his lot with Mohammed during
the later years of the Turkish civil war, and his ally let him enjoy the
dominions he had recovered by his original treaty with Suleiman in 1403.
Between 1402 and 1421, Europe had an unparalleled opportunity to rid
herself of the Ottomans. Unfortunately it was not taken. Sigismund, king
of Hungary, and at the same time Emperor, was the sovereign on whom the
duty of leading the attack ought to have fallen. But Sigismund was now
engaged in his great struggle with the Hussites in Bohemia. This wretched
religious war directed the strength of Hungary northward when it was
wanted in the south. Without such a power to back them the Servians,
though they recovered their own liberty as a result of the battle of
Angora, could do nothing towards driving the Turks from the Balkans. There
was never any sympathy between Serb and Magyar, and save under the direct
pressure of fear of a Moslem invasion they would not act together. The
Hungarian kings had always laid claim to a suzerainty over the crown of
Servia, and from time to time tried to convert their neighbours to Roman
Catholicism by force of arms. Hence there was no love lost between them,
and a crusade to expel the Turks was never concerted.
[Illustration]
Arabesque Design From A Byzantine MS. (_From "L’Art Byzantin." Par Charles
Bayet. Paris, Quantin, 1883._)
Mahomet the Unifier died in 1421, and evil days at once set in for
Constantinople and for Christendom, when his ambitious son Murad II. came
to the throne. Manuel Paleologus was one of the first to feel the change
in the times. He tried to make trouble for Murad, by supporting against
him two claimants to the Ottoman Sultanate, each named Mustapha, one the
uncle, the other the brother of the new ruler. This drew down on the
empire the fate which had been delayed since 1370: the Sultan declared war
on Manuel, took one after another all the fortresses which had been
recovered by the peace of 1403, and finally laid siege to Constantinople.
For the last time the walls of the city proved strong enough to repulse an
assault. Though Murad levelled against them cannon, then seen for the
first time in the East, built movable towers to shelter his troops, and
launched his terrible Janissaries to the assault, he could not succeed.
The report of a miraculous vision of the Virgin, who vouchsafed to reveal
herself as the defender of the city, encouraged the Greeks to resist with
a better spirit than might have been expected. At last the pretender
Mustapha, whom Manuel had supplied with money to cause a revolt against
his brother, began to stir up such trouble in Asia Minor, that the Sultan
determined to raise the siege and march against him. He granted Manuel
peace, on the condition that he ceded all his dominions save the cities of
Constantinople and Thessalonica and the Peloponnesian province. Thus the
empire once more sank back into a state of vassalage to the Ottomans
[1422].
Manuel II. died three years after, at the age of seventy-seven. He was the
last sovereign of Constantinople who won even a transient smile from
fortune. The tale of the last thirty years of the empire is one of
unredeemed gloom.
To Manuel succeeded his son John VI., whose whole reign was passed in
peace, without an attempt to shake off the Turkish yoke; such an attempt
indeed would have been hopeless, unless backed by aid from without. As
Manuel II. once observed, “the empire now requires a bailiff not a
statesman to rule it.” Treaties, wars, and alliances were not for him: all
that he could do was to try to save a little money, and to keep his walls
in good repair, and even these humble tasks were not always feasible.
All the descriptions of Constantinople in the fifteenth century, whether
written by Greek natives or by Western travellers, bear witness to a state
of exhaustion and debility which make us wonder that the empire did not
collapse sooner. The country outside the walls was a desert. Within them
more than half the ground was unoccupied, and covered only by ruins which
testified to ancient magnificence. The great palace by the Augustaeum,
which sheltered so many generations of emperors, had grown so dilapidated
that the Paleologi dwelt in a mere corner of it. Part of the porticoes of
St. Sophia had fallen down, and the Greeks could not afford to repair even
the greatest sanctuary of their faith. The population of the city had
shrunk to about a hundred thousand souls, most of them dwelling in great
poverty. Such commerce and wealth as still survived in Constantinople had
passed almost entirely into the hands of the Italians of Genoa and Venice,
whose fortified factories at Galata and Pera now contained the bulk of the
wares that passed through the city. The military strength of the empire
was composed of about four thousand mercenary troops, of whom many were
Franks and hardly any were born subjects of the empire. The splendid
court, which had once been the wonder of East and West, had shrunk to such
modest dimensions that a Burgundian traveller noted with surprise that no
more than eight attendants accompanied the empress when she went in state
to worship in St. Sophia.(32)