Decline & Fall - Byzantium 03 (49 page)

Meanwhile, quietly and unhurriedly, he was making his preparations to march on the capital as soon as the spring rains were over. Before he could do so, however, disturbing news was brought to him: Tsar Michael had unaccountably decided to change sides, and had sent three thousand Bulgarian cavalry for the defence of Constantinople. Andronicus hesitated no longer. Hurrying eastward with an advance guard, he managed to intercept the Bulgars before they had taken up their positions and persuaded their commander to order an immediate withdrawal, pointing out to him that he was acting in direct violation of the alliance entered into by his master less than a year before. Then, after sending the Tsar an angry message reminding him of his treaty obligations, he settled down to await the rest of his army.

The departure of the Bulgars was not the only blow sustained by the old Andronicus in the spring of 1328. Venice and Genoa were back once more at their usual tricks and, heedless of the sufferings of the Greek population, were using Constantinople and its surrounding waterways as their principal battleground. Throughout April a Venetian fleet of forty ships had been blockading Galata and the entrance to the Bosphorus, bringing the inhabitants of the city to the brink of famine. The years of civil war, during which opposing armies had trampled backwards and forwards across the fertile fields of Thrace, had made local agriculture impossible and interrupted their normal overland supply of food from the western provinces; now they could not even bring it in by sea. What little was available fetched huge prices, far beyond the reach of a people bled white by taxation, whose economy had long since been brought to a standstill. The old Emperor's popularity was diminishing day by day, his authority growing ever more insecure.

In such circumstances, the capture of the city by his grandson met with scant resistance. On the evening of 23 May 1328 Andronicus and John Cantacuzenus, at the head of a party of twenty-four men with siege ladders, crept up to the section of the great bastion opposite the Romanus Gate. Ropes were lowered by accomplices within the city, the ladders were hoisted up, and within minutes the first of the young Emperor's men were over the wall, opening the gate for their comrades. There was no killing, little looting; no one was hurt. Old Andronicus, awoken from a deep sleep, was initially terrified; but his fears were quickly allayed. All that was asked of him was to sign a deed of abdication; once that was done he was allowed to keep his imperial title and insignia and to continue, if he wished, to live in the Palace of Blachernae. Meanwhile a delegation was sent to free the Patriarch, Esaias by name, who in the previous year had refused to obey Andronicus IPs order to excommunicate his grandson and had been confined to the monastery of the Mangana. On his way back to his palace he was escorted not, Gregoras tells us, by the procession of distinguished ecclesiastics that might have been expected, but by a troupe of musicians, comedians and dancing girls, one of whom soon had him so helpless with laughter that he almost fell off his horse.

Apart from the old Emperor - who may well have been relieved to be spared a continuation of responsibilities for which he was manifestly unsuited - the only serious sufferer was his Grand Logothete, Theodore Metochites. In the absence of any other convenient scapegoat, this gentle scholar was now universally blamed for all his master's misfortunes and failures. Much of his property was confiscated; his house was plundered and burnt; he himself was initially exiled, but was then permitted to return to the monastery of St Saviour in Chora, which he had restored and embellished at his own expense some years before.
1
There - near the point where the Land Walls run down to the Golden Horn, only a stone's throw from Blachernae — he lived out the years remaining to him, dying at last in March 1332.

He outlived Andronicus II by a month. The old Emperor remained in Constantinople for two years after his abdication; then he too was packed off to a monastery, where he took the name of Antonius. On 13 February 1332 he dined with his daughter Simonis, the widow of

1
The church of the Chora - more generally known today as Kariye Camii - still stands. Thanks to its dazzling mosaics and superb frescos, a visit there is one of the most memorable experiences that even Istanbul has to offer. The mosaics include a splendid representation of Theodore himself, offering his church to Christ, while the fresco of the
Anastasis,
or Harrowing of Hell, in the apse of the side chapel to the south is perhaps the supreme masterpiece of all Christian art.

Stephen Miliutin of Serbia, and died within hours of rising from the table. He was seventy-three years old, and had reigned for almost exactly half a century. Seldom in all its thousand-year history had Byzantium been more in need of a strong and determined ruler; seldom had it suffered a weaker one. Had Andronicus II been less of a pietist and more of a statesman; had he made things happen instead of waiting until they happened to him; had he possessed half the diplomatic skills of his father, the courage of his son or the energy of his grandson he might have turned both the coming of the Catalans and the fall of the Seljuks to his advantage and possibly even arrested the Empire's decline. Instead, lacking as he was in any long-term vision or any clear political objective, he allowed it to drift rudderless from one catastrophe to the next until Andronicus III - who, with all his faults, at least knew what he wanted and was ready to fight for it - removed him, gently but firmly, from the helm. As for his unfortunate subjects - beleaguered, half-starving and crippled by senseless taxation - they were glad to see the last of him.

Andronicus III was now thirty-one. The past decade had brought him at last to something like maturity. True, with his thousand huntsmen, thousand hounds and thousand falcons, he may have given rather too much attention to the pleasures of the chase; and not all his subjects approved of his love of jousting, a sport that had been re-introduced
1
into Byzantine court circles by the Italian entourage of his second wife Anne, the daughter of Count Amadeus V of Savoy. Still, he had put the worst excesses of his youth behind him; and though he would always be capable of sudden bouts of irresponsibility and recklessness - and never lost his dangerous weakness for making promises that he was unable to fulfil - he was to prove himself a fearless soldier and, on the whole, a conscientious ruler. He was certainly an immense improvement on his grandfather.

Above all he was fortunate: fortunate in having at his side, throughout his thirteen-year reign, a man of quite outstanding ability in both the political and military fields and - more important still - unwavering loyalty to himself. John Cantacuzenus was more than the Emperor's friend and counsellor; he was, in a very real sense, his inspiration. Just as it was he who had been the guiding force behind the recent rebellion, so it was he, after the success of that rebellion, who now directed the

1
It may be remembered that Manuel Comnenus had also shown a certain enthusiasm for this most un-Byzantine of sports.
.

affairs of the Empire. He refused all titles - even those of Regent and co-Emperor, both of which were offered him by a grateful Andronicus -and held no titular office of state except that of Grand Domestic, or commander-in-chief; but few people in Constantinople had any doubts as to where the effective power really lay.

Yet it was probably Andronicus himself, rather than his Grand Domestic, who took the initiative for one of the first and most important decisions of his reign. He was fully aware - as, to their cost, were his subjects - that the imperial legal system was by now deeply corrupt. We have seen how easily John Cantacuzenus and Syrgiannes Palaeologus had bought governorships for themselves in Thrace; even the Grand Logothete Theodore Metochites, a man everywhere respected for his integrity and deeply versed in moral philosophy, unhesitatingly bought and sold high offices of state. Andronicus II had attempted to tackle the problem some thirty years before, with his usual lack of success; his grandson, less than a year after his accession as sole Emperor, now returned to the charge by instituting, in 1329, a new board of judges whom he designated 'Universal Justices of the Romans'. They were four in number - two ecclesiastics and two laymen - and effectively constituted a Supreme Court of Appeal, empowered to supervise the administration of the law throughout the Empire, with a special brief to watch for cases of corruption and tax evasion in high places. Loca
l justices were appointed in outl
ying regions with similar responsibilities. The system was not, it must be admitted, entirely successful. Corruption, once it has taken root, is notoriously hard to eradicate: as early as 1337, at a special court held in St Sophia under the joint presidency of Emperor and Patriarch, three of the four Universal Justices were themselves found guilty of accepting bribes, deprived of their office and sent into exile. But successors were immediately appointed, and the institution was to continue for as long as the Empire itself.

On the international stage, Andronicus's new policy of non-appeasement quickly began to show results. Within a month of his
coup,
Tsar Michael Sisman of Bulgaria invaded Thrace as he had done several times in the past. On this occasion, however, Andronicus retaliated by launching an immediate invasion of his own and capturing a Bulgarian stronghold; and when, two months later, Michael tried the same thing again he found a Byzantine army drawn up against him. The result was a treaty of peace, which prevented any further violations for the next two years and might well have lasted a good de
al longer had not the Bulgarian
army been totally destroyed on 28 July 1330 at Velbuzd - now Kjustendil - by the Serbs under Stephen Dechanski. The Tsar himself was mortally wounded in the battle, and died in captivity soon afterwards. Stephen installed his nephew John Stephen* on the Bulgarian throne, and poor Theodora had to flee for her life.

For Andronicus his sister's misfortune proved something of a blessing, giving him as it did a convenient pretext for interference in Bulgarian affairs. Ostensibly to avenge her honour, he seized the Black Sea ports of Mesembria and Anchialus which his grandfather had ceded to the Bulgars nearly a quarter of a century before, together with several fortresses that lined the imperial frontier. He did not, however, keep them long, for the following year was to bring palace revolutions to both the Slav states. In Bulgaria John Stephen and his mother Anna were thrown out in favour of Sisman's nephew John Alexander, while in Serbia Dechanski — who, it was considered, had failed to follow up his victory in the approved manner — was murdered by a group of nobles and replaced by his son Stephen Dushan. The two new rulers then formed an alliance, which they cemented by a marriage between Stephen Dushan and John Alexander's sister Helena; together they then began to work, the Serbs in Macedonia and the Bulgars in Thrace, towards the realization of their common dream - the overthrow of the
basileus
and the establishment of a great Slav Empire in Constantinople. John Alexander easily won back the disputed Black Sea ports, while Stephen pushed steadily southward into Byzantine territory - much helped, it must be said, by the Empire's own internal troubles, not the least of which was the desertion in 1334 of Syrgiannes Palaeologus to the Serbian camp.

Syrgiannes is a difficult character to understand. An aristocrat on his mother's side - though a half-breed on his father's - he had been one of the closest and most intimate friends both of the Emperor and of his Grand Domestic. He was extremely intelligent and seems to have been possessed of unusual charm; but he knew the meaning neither of faith nor of loyalty. Once already he had betrayed his master - during the civil war, when he had shamelessly gone over to Andronicus II. Soon afterwards he had been implicated in a plot to murder the old Emperor, and had been sentenced to life imprisonment; but he had been released by Andronicus III after his assumption of power, formally pardoned - at

1
John Stephen was the son of Dechanski's sister Anna, the first wife of Michael Sisman, whom he had divorced to marry Andro
nicus's sister Theodora.

the insistent demand, we are told, of John Cantacuzenus - and, somewhat surprisingly, appointed Governor of Thessalonica. On his arrival there, he immediately began to make trouble, intriguing against Cantacuzenus and ingratiating himself with the Emperor's
mother Rita-Maria - who had settl
ed in the city after her husband's death - to the point where she adopted him as her son. In 1333 she died in her turn, and it soon became clear that Syrgiannes was once again hatching a conspiracy, this time against the Emperor himself and presumably with a view to replacing him on the throne. Whether or not he was already in touch with Stephen Dushan is not certain; but Thessalonica was too close to the Serbian frontier for comfort, and Andronicus was taking no chances. Syrgiannes was put under close arrest and taken to the capital for trial; before proceedings could begin, however, he escaped across the Golden Horn to Galata and thence, via Euboea and Thessaly, to Serbia. There Stephen Dushan welcomed him warmly and gave him command of an army, which in the spring of 1334 captured Kastoria and a number of neighbouring strongholds.

The Emperor and John Cantacuzenus hurried to Macedonia, determined to eliminate Syrgiannes once and for all. Uncertain, however, whether their hastily-gathered army was sufficient for the task, they decided on a more devious method. Selecting one of the senior officers on the staff, a certain Sphrantzes Palaeologus,
1
they proposed to him a plan whereby he would be appointed a local governor of several small towns around Thessalonica. This, they believed, would be the perfect bait for Syrgiannes, who would immediately try to subvert him. Sphrantzes in turn would accept these overtures, and quickly gain his confidence; it would then be an easy matter for him to arrest Syrgiannes and deliver him up for punishment.