Constantinople: A Sketch of its History from its Foundation to its Conquest by the Turks in 1453/Chapter 11
CHAPTER XI.
THE LAST EMPERORS.
HE Byzantime empire would seem to have been endued with an almost miraculous vitality. Its capture and sack by the ruthless Latins might have been expected utterly and finally to extinguish it. Yet it was destined to survive the Latin conquest, and to see the downfall of the kingdom which for little better than half a century had usurped its place. Again it lifted its head, and for two more centuries Roman emperors, Cæsars as they were styled by their subjects and by the world, reigned with some outward splendour and some real power at Constantinople.
During these its last years, however, it painfully exhibited the infirmities of extreme old age. It was indeed "the sick man;" its ultimate recovery, it was unmistakably plain, was out of the question. The Turks under the House of Othman were conquering Asia Minor and menacing Europe early in the fourteenth century. Constantinople, it is true, had successfully resisted foes as barbarous and as formidable. But in those days she possessed resources of which she had now been stripped. She was still wealthy, and the centre of a vast commerce; she could send numerous and well-equipped armies into the field, and her fleets, though once, as we have seen, worsted by Genseric and his Vandals, were powerful enough to command the Euxine and guard her possessions in the Mediterranean. Now all was changed. The Latin Crusader had spoiled and wasted her beyond the possibility of her ever again attaining the pre-eminent wealth and grandeur which had made her seem to be almost a worthy seat of the Cæsars. Her harbour was not crowded with merchant ships, as of old, and her suburbs were no longer the chosen residences of wealthy families from all parts of the world. The republics of Venice and Genoa had succeeded to her riches and her maritime power. The suburb of Galata or Pera was granted by the emperor who, in 1261, restored the Greek empire at Constantinople, as a possession to the Genoese, who had concluded an alliance with the Greeks, and had promised their naval assistance, at least for the defence of their capital. Established in this quarter, which they were to hold as the emperor's vassals on the usual terms of such a tenure, they soon by their enterprise drew into their own hands the commerce of the surrounding seas, and made themselves in fact independent of their nominal head.
The emperor to whom we have referred was the Michael Palæologus whom we have already had occasion to mention. We can but glance briefly at the events of his reign and at those of his successors. Of those events the chief, as far as the Byzantine empire is concerned, was the progress and conquests of the Turks. It was becoming evident that against this new power the empire would not be able to hold its own without vigorous support from the West. It was the anxious endeavour of some of the last emperors to procure a union between East and West, and one of them, Manuel, even visited France, Germany, and England, as a suppliant, pleading in the name of a common Christianity for resistance to the arms of the "infidel."
It was in the July of 1261, just as Baldwin and the Latins were on the point of flight, that we may say that Michael began his reign as a Byzantine emperor. He had indeed been crowned two years before at Nicæa, but now he was to enter the capital of his empire in triumph, and to hear from Greeks and Genoese the shout, "Long life and victory to Michael and John, the august emperors of the Romans!" John, the son of the late Emperor Theodore Lascaris, was at the time a boy of about eleven years of age. In the course of a few months he passed away into oblivion, his sight having been first destroyed by the singular device of confronting his eyes with the blinding glare of red-hot metal. For three years Michael lay under a sentence of excommunication from the patriarch of Constantinople, Arsenius, who, as the young prince's guardian, resented the crime, and, as a man with a strong sense of duty, thus publicly denounced it. In vain the emperor begged for absolution. He could only get Arsenius removed, and an obsequious monk elected in his room. Arsenius was respected both by people and clergy, and a prolonged schism was the result of his unjust treatment.
Michael found his capital an impoverished and well-nigh ruined city. The Latins during the last days of their occupation had not spared even the churches, and the Franks had polluted the palace with their drunken orgies. Michael applied himself vigorously to the work of restoration, and conciliated the traders of Genoa, Venice, and Pisa, by confirming the charters previously granted to them. He did everything he could to restore the commerce of Constantinople. He showed vigour, too, in recovering for the empire some of its lost territories. Lesbos, Chios, and Rhodes, and other islands of the Archipelago which had been comprised in the Byzantine dominions, were reconquered from the Latins; but the Asiatic provinces of the empire were neglected and left to the mercy of the advancing power of the Turks. There was again also danger from a possible Latin coalition. Charles of Anjou had allied himself with Philip, son of the Emperor Baldwin, with Pope Martin IV., and the Venetians, and an expedition was to be made from Brindisi for the attack of Constantinople. But all ended in failure. A rash and premature attempt at invasion was made by a small body of knights, who were utterly overwhelmed by a Greek army at Belgrade. The designs of Charles recoiled on himself. Sicily was lost to him in 1282, the year of the "Sicilian Vespers," and the Greek emperor, who died that same year, saw both safety assured to his capital and his enemy thoroughly humbled.
The two following reigns—those of Andronicus II., Michael's son, and of his grandson, Andronicus III., or the Younger—bring us down to the year 1341. The first reign covers a period of fifty years, for which we have indeed abundant historical materials; but the story, as Gibbon says, is a "languid as well as a prolix" one. The emperor was a very different man from his father, who certainly had vigour and ability, though when it served his purpose he could be both cruel and treacherous. Andronicus had a reputation for learning, and he was perhaps a really conscientious man. He was, however, unfortunately priestridden, and his religion was too much that of the mere monk and ecclesiastic. He was not at all a man of the world, and never ought to have been at the head of a small principality, much less of what still claimed to be an empire. After the fashion of his day he made his son Michael his colleague, but the young man, though styled emperor for twenty-five years, was of no service to the state either as a leader of its armies or as a director of its politics. All that could be said of him was that he was docile and well behaved. He had, however, a son, Andronicus the Younger, afterwards emperor, on whom even this negative praise could not be bestowed. Brought up in the palace with the idea that he was heir to the empire, he at first impressed his grandfather with the belief that he was a youth of singular promise, but he soon disgusted the strict and parsimonious old man by riotous living, and by contracting heavy debts with the Genoese money-lenders of Pera. Finally, when he found that he had hopelessly lost his grandfather's favour, and was to be excluded from the throne, he set up the standard of rebellion at Adrianople, and had as his abettor John Cantacuzenus, then the chief imperial minister, and subsequently his successor on the throne. He contrived, it is said, to muster a force of 50,000 troops, far larger, in fact, than could be brought into the field against the foreign enemies who were threatening the remnants of the empire. Civil war, or rather three consecutive civil wars, during a miserable seven years, was the immediate result. In 1328 the old emperor abdicated, asking only his life from his victorious grandson. For a while he lived in the palace, with the name of emperor and a liberal pension. His end was one which will not surprise us. From being a royal prisoner in the hands of keepers who despised and at last even threatened him, he became, or was forced into becoming, a monk, and under the changed name Antonius he died four years after his abdication.
His grandson's reign of thirteen years was a period of rapid decay for the empire. The younger Andronicus was already a worn-out man of pleasure, and he seems to have been quite indifferent to the public misfortunes. He was twice married, his first wife being the daughter of a duke of Brunswick, the head of a petty principality in the north of Germany, and his second the sister of the count of Savoy, who was crowned empress in the Greek Church of St. Sophia under the name of Anne. The time was when such alliances would have been spurned by a Byzantine emperor, but the Latin conquest and empire had somewhat lowered the pride of the "Roman Cæsar." Soon, as we shall see, he would have to stoop to the humiliation of craving succour from powers which his predecessors had disdained as barbarous.
It had been prophesied in his last moments by a senator during Michael's reign that the re-establishment of the Greek empire at Constantinople would prove the ruin of Asia. The irruptions of the Mogul Tartars into Europe and Asia Minor were a terrible but a comparatively brief calamity, and the senator's prophecy was not fulfilled till the Mogul had made way for the Turk. The reign of the elder Andronicus saw the advance of the Turks up to the shores of the Bosporus. The mountain passes of Bithynia, which ought to have been guarded, by a local militia, had been neglected, and in the year 1299 Othman, the founder of the dynasty and empire named after him, approached the coasts of the Propontis near Nicomedia, of old the chief city of Bithynia. Prusa (Broussa), destined to be a well-known name in Eastern history, surrendered to his son Orchan in the same year, and its capture may be said to mark the first beginning of the Ottoman empire. A rapid advance was now made in these parts, and the reign of the younger Andronicus was particularly inglorious for the Greek empire. The emperor, however, fond of ease and pleasure as he was, did take the field, and encountered his new enemy, but only to be defeated and to lose the cities of Nicæa and Nicomedia, which for centuries had been under the Byzantine sway. Nearly all the western shores of the Archipelago had been already wrested from the empire. The Roman province of Asia, in fact, was now once for all lost to it, and its old cities, with their relics of past greatness and of Greek civilization, were reduced to poverty-stricken villages. The invader had no sympathy with what we admire and regret. He desolated and destroyed as well as conquered, as the condition of the country in our day mournfully attests. The noble and once flourishing city of Ephesus now perished, and it is but in our own generation that some ruins of its famous temple have at last been brought to light by the patient industry of Mr. Wood. Heathen and Christian antiquity alike were almost effaced, and the wasting of this beautiful and historic region is one of the most painful chapters in the history of the world.
While all this miserable work was being done, the empire was torn, as we have seen, by civil strife between the elder and younger Andronicus. But for the feeble effort of the latter at resistance, the enemy went quite unchecked, and the Turkish chiefs (emirs as they were called) were now beginning to harass with their ships the islands of the Mediterranean and the Greek shores. But it was not till some years afterwards that we can say that the Turks established themselves in Europe. A strange incident had meanwhile occurred. The daughter of John Cantacuzenus, the minister who had supported the younger Andronicus against his grandfather, had been given in marriage to Orchan, now become for a time the emperor's ally. The friendship and alliance of the Turk involved the condition that he might sell his prisoners of war as slaves at Constantinople, and we hear of Christians, both men and women, being sold by public auction. Yet the interval between this infamy and the end of all was longer than we might have expected. It seems that Orchan, with barbaric cunning, completely outwitted the imperial ministers, and became master of some fortresses in Thrace, and of the commanding position of Gallipoli. Cantacuzenus saw that a stronger power was rapidly pushing aside the decrepit empire, and in his last counsels advised his Greek subjects to bow to inevitable fate. His advice may have been prudent, but it is some satisfaction to find that it was not followed. The Greeks or some of them still clung to the hope of saving the poor remains of their empire. But Orchan's son and successor, Amurath I., by whom the famous force of the janissaries was at least regularly organised, if not actually created, won a series of easy triumphs, and his arms in Europe and in Asia left Constantinople utterly isolated, and, as we may suppose, quite at his mercy. John Palæologus was emperor only in name. He was Amurath's vassal, and he and his sons had to dance attendance, in court and camp, on the mighty barbarian. If he was to be saved from this degradation, he must appeal to the pope or the Western powers, and even from this quarter deliverance would be by no means certain.
His predecessor, Cantacuzenus, who, like the elder Andronicus, had ended his days in the retirement of the cloister, attempted through Pope Clement VI. to arrange a reconciliation between the East and the West, with a view to the strengthening of the Greek empire. He had, as we have said, almost betrayed its interests by his friendship with Orchan, to whom he had married his daughter, and now his endeavours to undo the mischief of having let the Turkish power establish itself in Europe were all in vain. John Palæologus, whose long reign of thirty-six years, from 1355 to 1391, witnessed the unmistakable signs of impending downfall, made similar attempts with no better success. He is to be remembered as the first of the emperors who himself went a suppliant to the pope at Rome, begging help against the infidel. After having duly kissed the pontiff's hands and feet, and led his mule by the bridle, he was feasted in the Vatican, but he had to leave it with very little encouragement. Pope Urban V. could not revive the enthusiasm of the age of the Crusades, and the emperor was obliged to return in bitter disappointment. He had to pass through Venice, and here he found himself in a miserably ridiculous plight. On his way to Rome he had borrowed largely from the Venetian bankers and money-lenders, and now, as he was unable to pay, his creditors held his person in pawn. His brother Manuel was generous enough to become his security, and by selling and mortgaging all he possessed, he satisfied their claims, and enabled the emperor to return to his capital, whence during the remainder of his reign he had to look on quietly while his empire was being narrowed down by the conquests of Amurath to the mere precincts of the city.
His son Manuel succeeded him, and reigned from 1391 to 1425. Manuel from boyhood must have been well drilled in lessons of humiliation, as with his father and his brother he had been an attendant in court and camp on the barbarian monarch. At the time of his father's death he was a hostage in the hands of Bajazet, Amurath's son and successor, and was living in his palace at Broussa. Thence he contrived to escape, and hurried to Constantinople. The Turk, a savage warrior of the most furious energy,[1] gave him a brief respite, and completed meanwhile his father's conquests in Europe and Asia. Then at last he sent Manuel a letter, bidding him resign his capital, or tremble for himself and his people. However, he graciously allowed the poor emperor to purchase a truce of ten years, one of the inglorious conditions of which was that there was to be a mosque in Constantinople. But even this truce was too much for the impatient Bajazet, and now Manuel's sole resource was to seek help from the West. The duke of Burgundy and the young princes of France, with Sigismund, king of Hungary, and a host of German knights, fought with impetuous ardour for Christendom in this extremity, and would have won the day but for their overweening confidence and the overwhelming numbers of the barbarian cavalry. The battle of Nicopolis, in 1396, was fiercely contested, and the janissaries had to yield to the chivalry of the West. But in the end Bajazet's victory was decisive, and the duke of Burgundy and the French princes became his prisoners. The peril to Constantinople was now again imminent, and but for the rapid movements of Tamerlane, who was now threatening the newly-acquired Ottoman possessions, it must have fallen. In 1400 Manuel quitted the city, and for two years was a voluntary exile. He was a suppliant at the courts of France, England, and Germany, but with no result. He was courteously and hospitably entertained, and received the honour due to an emperor. Henry IV. of England was particularly attentive to him, and almost encouraged him to believe that he would give him something more than mere sympathy. But the circumstances of Western Europe were altogether unfavourable to his views. It was the time of the great schism, when the Church was divided between rival popes at Rome and Avignon. Manuel, however, on his return, found himself delivered from his worst fears. The terrible Tartar conqueror, after carrying his destructive arms from Russia to India, had struck down the sultan—a title which Bajazet was the first of the House of Othman to assume—in a great battle in the plains round the city of Angora. Bajazet was utterly overthrown, and according to the old story which has made his name memorable, lived for years in captivity, a prisoner in an iron cage.[2] Tamerlane's victory was a piece of great good fortune for Manuel. The Ottoman conquests were stayed at least for a time, and Bajazet's five sons seemed bent on undoing the work of their father by strife among themselves. Asiatic dynasties, as Gibbon has truly observed, present "an unceasing round of valour, greatness, discord, degeneracy, and decay." In this instance the Ottoman power speedily recovered itself under a prince of unquestionable capacity and some really great qualities, who perhaps deserved success, Amurath II. But its temporary eclipse after the fall of Bajazet gave the empire a little breathing space, and even a transient gleam of prosperity. Some of the Ottoman conquests were lost, and a few of the cities of Thessaly and Macedonia were surrendered to the emperor. One of Bajazet's sons, Mousa, who with his father had been taken prisoner at the battle of Angora, did indeed threaten Constantinople both by land and sea. But his fleet was defeated, and his attempt on the city by land resolved itself into nothing more than a few skirmishes under the walls, and could not be called a siege. Manuel, however, was by no means hopeful as to the future, and in speaking about his son to his chief minister, Phranza, the last of the Byzantine historians, he intimated that the time for an emperor was past, and that "a cautious steward was needed for the relics of empire." Acting on this principle, he tried to secure some advantages by a cunning diplomacy, and to recover Gallipoli by supporting the designs of Mustapha, a pretended son of Bajazet, then at Constantinople. His idea was to undermine the strength of the Ottoman by encouraging dynastic quarrels. But his arts failed him. Mustapha, having got Gallipoli, would not cede it to the emperor, saying that he could not give up what was now a Mussulman town. After some successes he was deserted by his partisans, and was taken prisoner and hanged by Amurath. Manuel's unfortunate intrigue soon brought trouble on him. Amurath laid siege to Constantinople with an army, it is said, of 200,000 men, and with some rude specimens of artillery, now used by the Turks for the first time. The city's defences had been strengthened, it appears, by the late Emperor John, and it was now well able to defy the sultan's clumsy cannon, and an assault headed by a famous dervish was repulsed with very trifling loss to the defenders. Of the janissaries, the flower of the assailing army, upwards of a thousand were slain; while of the besiegers, who fought almost in safety from their walls, both killed and wounded did not exceed a hundred and thirty. The siege had been begun in the June of 1422, and lasted two months, and then the sultan, who under different circumstances would no doubt have prolonged it, was hurried back to Broussa by tidings of his brother's revolt. He did not again attack Constantinople. The emperor and sultan concluded a peace, the terms of which were fairly favourable to the former, who, though he had to pay a considerable tribute, still numbered among his possessions Thessalonica and some towns in Thrace. He lived to a good old age, and died in the year 1425, having, after the manner of the Palæologi, become a monk towards his life's close.
His son, John Palæologus II., had, it is said, during his father's lifetime shown signs of a rather enterprising disposition. These Manuel, as we have seen, decidedly discouraged, as ill-suited to the age and even pregnant with danger to the empire, which in his opinion could hope only for a very tame and quiet existence. John, from 1425 to 1448, reigned quite on sufferance as the vassal and tributary of the sultan. Whatever may have once been his thoughts and aspirations, he now contentedly acquiesced in the humble position of "a cautious steward of empire." At the Council of Florence, 1438, he and the patriarch of Constantinople, with the Greek bishops, submitted themselves to the Latin Church; but the ecclesiastics on their return had to repudiate this submission, and were themselves despised and distrusted alike by their own people and the Latins, whom they had wished to conciliate. If the emperor had ever allowed himself to hope for support from the West against the Turk, he must soon have been convinced of his self-deception. It might have once for a brief space seemed possible that the Ottoman power would fall before Ladislaus, king of Hungary, and his brave general, Huniades, but the battle of Varna in 1444 was a decisive victory for Amurath. The emperor thought it well to be civil to the victor, and sent to congratulate him on his success, and to beg that he might again be his friend and ally. His prayer was heard, and for four more years he lived to enjoy the sultan's favour.
We are now within five years of the end. With the reign of one more emperor Byzantine history finally closes. The last of the Cæsars was Constantine Palæologus, a name not inglorious, though associated with a fearful downfall. He was worthy of a happier age, and he perished, we shall see, like a hero, mindful of the empire he represented, and resolved to shed at least some glory on its dissolution. The brother of the late emperor, he succeeded to the throne at the mature age of fifty-four. At the time of his brother's death he was governing with the title of "despot" a little fragment of the empire in the Peloponnese, the defence of which he had maintained with some spirit and bravery against the Turks. He had two brothers still living, Demetrius and Thomas, and of these the former, as the elder and as "born in the purple," had a priority of claim, and he was supported by a party. But he was passed over, and the choice of nobles, clergy, and people fell on Constantine, who really deserved it. Their choice, however, was not enough to decide the matter. The sultan, whose tributary vassal the late emperor had been, must be consulted. Constantine himself, it appears, was not particularly eager to accept what he must have felt was little more than a barren honour. He may well have foreseen that very possibly he might be the last of the long line of so-called Roman emperors. It might be a question whether Amurath would even give him the chance, as he had dared to resist his arms during his government in the Peloponnese. The sultan held his court at Adrianople, and thither Phranza went as an ambassador to learn his wishes. With Amurath's assent Constantine was proclaimed emperor. He was crowned at Sparta in 1449.
Phranza, who was a few years younger than the emperor, had his full confidence and managed all business for him, "I am surrounded," said Constantine of his court, "by men whom I can neither love nor trust nor esteem." The Greek nobles of the last period of the empire seem, indeed, to have been a worthless set. They could, no doubt, now and then fight bravely when the capital itself was attacked. But in general they were quarrelsome and intriguing, cunning and mistrustful, and anything like patriotic feeling had quite died out from among them. The emperor, we may be pretty sure, was not too hard on them. Phranza was indeed a noble exception. He was not only an able man, as a minister and a diplomatist, but he appears to have been a really faithful servant. He must have known both Greeks and Turks thoroughly. He had been on many an embassy to the sultan, and more than once had outwitted his ministers. On one occasion he made them look very foolish by making them drunk at one of his entertainments, and then getting hold of some state papers in their possession. Having ascertained the contents, he quietly and politely put the papers back into the Turks' pockets. This is just what we might have expected from a Greek. Phranza, as a minister in a difficult time, must have been invaluable. He certainly is invaluable as a historian of a period which, but for his chronicle written long afterwards in a monastery in Corfu, would be much less distinctly known to us. It is indeed a great thing to have a contemporary record from a man who had so many excellent opportunities. Phranza witnessed with his own eyes the fall of Constantinople, and if his narrative is apt to be rather too prolix and grandiloquent, we may at any rate congratulate ourselves that the story of that memorable event as told by such an eyewitness has come down to us.