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.
