Decline & Fall - Byzantium 03 (45 page)

Andronicus did his best to placate the Arsenites, giving them a special church in Constantinople and even going so far as to appoint one of them, the Bishop of Sardis, as his personal confessor. When, however, on the death of Patriarch Joseph early in
1283,
there was chosen to succeed him a scholarly layman from Cyprus - who took the name of Gregory II - rather than one of their own number as they had expected, Arsenite tempers flared up again; and it was in a further effort to assuage them that Gregory immediately convened a synod in the church of Blachernae. Here two of his fellow-Patriarchs, those of Alexandria and Antioch, were called upon to make formal recantation of their past pro-unionist statements — the latter actually resigned and fled to Syria -while from Michael's widow, the Empress Theodora, was required a profession of her Greek faith and a solemn undertaking that she would never request for her husband a proper Christian burial.

These measures did much to mollify the Orthodox; but they cut little ice with the Arsenites. In
1284
therefore we find the Emperor actually permitting the body of Arsenius, who had died in exile, to be returned to the capital, where it was buried in a specially-constructed shrine in the monastery of St Andrew. Six years later in
1290
he was to make a still more memorable gesture, when he personally paid a visit to the blind John Lascaris, in the prison at Dakibyze on the Marmara where he had languished for the past twenty-nine years. George Pachymeres' account of their interview is tantalizingly short, mentioning only that the Emperor begged John's forgiveness for Michael's ill-treatment of him, inquired whether there was anything he could do to make his life more comfortable, and finally asked for his recognition as the rightful Emperor of Byzantium. Perhaps wisely in the circumstances, Pachymeres does not record the prisoner's reply.

By this time Patriarch Gregory had been tried for heresy and obliged to resign, and after a longish interregnum Andronicus had managed to secure the election of a former hermit from Mount Athos named Athanasius. To the pious Emperor, the new Patriarch's undoubted asceticism seemed just what was needed to divert the Church from the undesirable political issues that had occupied it for so long; to his ecclesiastics, on the other hand, the man was little more than an unwashed fanatic who went about in a hair shirt and sandals and devoted his time to castigating them for their worldliness and wealth. When he began to institute measures to deprive the richer churches and monasteries of their valuables, they made no secret of their hostility: Athanasius was attacked and even occasionally stoned in the street, to the point where he never ventured forth without a bodyguard. In the summer of 1293 the Emperor returned from several months in Asia Minor -where he had been looking into the administration and defences of the rapidly dwindling Byzantine territories - to be met by a delegation of leading churchmen demanding the Patriarch's removal. He resisted it as best he could; but the opposition was too strong, and in October Athanasius resigned in his turn - though not before drawing up a patriarchal bull in his own handwriting, in which he anathematized his enemies and all those who had been involved in the conspiracy against him. This document he characteristically concealed in the capital of a column in the north gallery of St Sophia. It was discovered only some years later - when, it need hardly be said, it caused a considerable commotion.

Meanwhile, the political situation of the Empire was growing ever more desperate. There had admittedly been a bright spot in 1284, when the widowed Emperor* had taken as his second wife the eleven-year-old Yolanda, daughter of William V, Marquis of Montferrat. William still styled himself 'King of Thessalonica', a title that dated back to the Fourth Crusade; this claim he now surrendered to his new son-in-law, ostensibly as part of Yolanda's dowry. It had not been pressed for a number of years, but Andronicus - who in fact had paid him handsomely for it - clearly considered it important that there should be no ambiguity about the position of the second city in the Empire. He knew moreover

1
Andronicus's first wife Anne, the daughter of Stephen V of Hungary, had died in
1281,
the year before his accession.

that if by any chance Thessalonica were attacked, he would find it hard indeed to come to its rescue; for he had already decided, in view of the state of the imperial finances, to pare his armed forces to the bone.

Economies were indeed necessary, in the military field as everywhere else; and yet, even with his Asiatic dominions shrinking almost daily, it seems hard to believe that the Emperor could have acted as irresponsibly as he did. The loss of Anatolia had long since deprived Byzantium of its traditional source of manpower; for many years already it had had to rely on foreign mercenaries. Andronicus's mistake was not only to reduce the numbers of these to almost suicidally low levels; it was also to disband the seasoned mercenary regiments, taking on instead motley groups of footloose wanderers and refugees whose comparative cheapness was no substitute for discipline or experience. As for the navy, he abolished it altogether - to the obvious delight of the Genoese, who could now demand a far higher price for their support and could meanwhile devote their energies to developing their own interests in Constantinople, the Black Sea and the Aegean without interference from Byzantium. They benefited too - as did the Turks, who having at last reached the shores of the Mediterranean, had begun to establish a navy of their own and welcomed the expert guidance in shipbuilding and seamanship which they received from the thousands of penniless sailors who now in desperation applied to them for employment.

The Turks were no longer the unified fighting force that they had been during the heyday of the Seljuk Sultanate. The Sultan's defeat by the Mongols at Kosedag in 1243 had effectively put an end to his power in Anatolia; and since Hulagu's capture of Baghdad in 1258 and the consequent destruction of the Abbasid Caliphate, the Seljuks had been no more than Mongol vassals. Meanwhile a number of Turkish tribes -together with countless families of Turkoman nomads from Persia and Mesopotamia - having fled westward before the Mongol advance, had finally settled in the no man's land along the Byzantine frontier; and with the collapse of the Sultanate they had taken to making regular destructive incursions into imperial territory — incursions which the Empire, whose position in Asia Minor had never recovered from the restoration of 1261, was virtually powerless to resist. These raids they soon began to consider - and indeed to justify - as a branch of the traditional Islamic
jihad,
or Holy War against the infidel; and from there it was but a short step to see themselves as Ghazis, or Warriors for the Faith. All through the second half of the thirteenth century their numbers had steadily increased. By the first years of the fourteenth only a few major strongholds - Nicaea and Nicomedia, Sardis and Brusa, Philadelphia, Lopadium
1
and Magnesia - and a few isolated ports like Ania (now Ku§adasi) and Heraclea on the Black Sea still held out; apart from these beleaguered enclaves, all Anatolia had been engulfed in the Turkish tide.

In the West, too, the situation was deteriorating fast. There had been some rejoicing in Constantinople when Charles of Anjou had died in 1285, leaving his throne to his son Charles II, who was at that time a prisoner of Peter of Aragon; but the young King was freed four years later, and soon showed himself just as hostile to Byzantium - and just as dangerous — as his father had been before him. In 1291 - the year of the fall of Acre, the last Crusader Kingdom of Outremer - he proposed an alliance with Nicephorus, Despot of Epirus, to be cemented by the marriage of the latter's daughter Thamar with his own son Philip.
2
For once Andronicus was quick to react, sending what was left of his army, supported by the Genoese fleet, to attack the Epirot capital of Arta. The expedition at first proved surprisingly successful,, regaining not only Ioannina but also Durazzo before it was forced to withdraw; but it could not prevent the projected alliance. On Philip's marriage in 1294 he was made overlord of all his father's Greek possessions, with the title of Prince of Taranto. Henceforth Epirus was to be held as a fief of Naples. This second Angevin threat to Constantinople was still no bigger than a man's hand, but it was already unmistakable.

Meanwhile in Serbia a new ruler, Stephen Miliutin, had come to the throne in 1282
3
under the name of Stephen Urosh II, and before the year was out had declared his support for Charles of Anjou, allied himself with Epirus, declared war on the Empire and captured Skoplje, which he made his capital. Here, for Andronicus, was another anxiety. Skoplje was a strategic strong-point on the Axius river, commanding the road south to Thessalonica and northern Greece. Moreover, Miliutin was known to have gone through a form of marriage with a daughter of John Ducas of Thessaly. A Serbian—Thessalian alliance would constitute

1
Now Ulubad.

2
This marriage would have been the more galling for the Emperor in that Thamar had been formerly proposed by her parents as a bride for his son Michael, the later co-Emperor: an arrangement that would have brought Epirus back into the Empire. Alas, the Patriarch had objected to the marriage on canonical grounds and the opportunity had been lost.

j His reigning elder brother, Stephen Dragutin (Stephen Urosh I), had been injured in that year after a fall from his horse and had decided to divide the Kingdom with Miliutin. Technically the two were co-rulers until Dragutin's death in
1316,
but from
1282
Miliutin was effectively in control.

a serious threat not only to Thessalonica itself but to the whole westward route across the Balkan peninsula to the Adriatic.

At length in 1297 Andronicus, all too conscious of his military weakness, decided on a diplomatic solution. Hearing that Miliutin's only legal wife (though he kept two full-time concubines, to say nothing of the Thessalian princess) had recently died, he proposed that she should be replaced by his own sister Eudocia, the widow of John II of Trebizond. To a Serbian ruler the prospect of being brother-in-law to the Emperor of Byzantium was irresistible, and Miliutin accepted with delight; difficulties arose only when Andronicus broached the matter with Eudocia, who would have none of it. If, she objected, her brother thought that she would be prepared to go and live with a lecherous barbarian who had at least one wife already, he was very much mistaken; besides, it was common knowledge that her intended husband was now involved in a torrid relationship with his sister-in-law - who was, incidentally, a nun.

The Emperor knew his sister too well to think that he could persuade her; at the same time he could not lose face with Miliutin. There was only one solution: Simonis, his daughter by Yolanda-Irene. True, she was five years old, and her husband-to-be about forty; none the less, she must be sacrificed. At Easter 1299 he personally escorted Simonis to Thessalonica, where her bridegroom was waiting; and there, in his presence, the wedding took place, the Archbishop of Ochrid officiating. Miliutin, we are told, was enchanted with his bride - particularly since she brought as her dowry all the Macedonian territory that he had already conquered; he agreed, however, that she should remain in the Serbian royal nursery for a few more years, until she was old enough to live with him as his wife. In Constantinople, the Patriarch John XII resigned in protest; but even he could not find anything strictly uncanonical about the marriage, and after a few months' indecision he was finally persuaded to resume his office.

In Constantinople itself, the end of the thirteenth century was a time of unrelieved trouble, the beginning of the fourteenth if anything worse. Michael Palaeologus, for all his unpopularity, had at least been a strong and decisive Emperor; his son, quite apart from his morbid religiosity, was proving himself ever weaker and more feckless, incapable of halting the Empire's accelerating decline. As early as 1292, while he was in Asia Minor, a conspiracy had been discovered, the ringleader of which proved to be his own brother Constantine. The rebel prince was thrown into prison, where he was to remain until his death twelve years later; but the plots continued, and in the autumn of 1295 the Empire's foremost general, Alexius Philanthropenus - hero of the battle of Demetrias twenty years before - emboldened by a series of victories against the Turks, rose in open revolt. It too came to nothing: betrayed by certain of his soldiers, he was captured and blinded. But the Emperor, who had liked and trusted him, had been deeply shaken by his treachery and never entirely regained his nerve.

Moreover, as if Constantinople did not have enough troubles of its own, it had also become one of the principal battlefields
on which Genoa and Venice settl
ed their differences. In July 1296 - a few weeks after the column erected by Michael VIII had been ominously toppled by an earthquake - a fleet of seventy-five Venetian ships sailed up to the mouth of the Bosphorus and launched a vicious attack on the Genoese colony at Galata, setting fire to the harbour buildings and warehouses along the shore. The imperial garrison hastened to the rescue, whereupon the Venetians turned their fire on the city itself, burning all the Greek houses within range as they passed by the sea walls along the Marmara. Andronicus immediately sent ambassadors to Venice with a strong protest; but the Genoese of Galata had no time for diplomatic niceties. In December they launched their own counter-attack, destroyed the principal Venetian buildings and massacred all the leading Venetians in the city.

Now it was Venice's turn. The following summer another fleet appeared, bearing a personal dispatch from the Doge. In it he accused the Emperor of having encouraged the Genoese in their behaviour, held him responsible for the damage done and demanded full compensation. Given time, Andronicus would probably have paid up, to prevent any further incident; but before he could do so - and apparently before the great chain could be raised to bar their way - the Venetians swept into the Golden Horn and, dropping anchor beneath the Palace of Blachernae, set fire to one of the Emperor's galleys beached on the shore. They then returned, with a host of Genoese prisoners, to Venice. At about the same time yet another Venetian fleet burst through the Genoese blockade of the Bosphorus and into the Black Sea, where it seized the Crimean port of Caffa - now Feodosia — and held it against furious attack from the local Tartars until, with the coming of winter, it was forced to withdraw.