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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