Decline & Fall - Byzantium 03 (50 page)

All went as arranged - except that at the critical moment Sphrantzes exceeded his brief and, instead of seizing the traitor, killed him outright. He was reprimanded for his disobedience, but was soon afterwards promoted to the rank of Grand Stratopedarch
2
with a considerable increase of salary. It was a small price for the Emperor to pay: only a month or two later, in August 1334, he and Stephen Dushan met on the

1
The surname is uncertain. John Cantacuzenus - who should know — refers to him simply as Sphrantzes, and adds that although he was a senior member of the Senate, he was of undistinguished birth.

2
According to a fourteenth-century book of ceremonial, the holder of this rank was responsible for the provisioning of the army; in most cases, however, the title seems to have been purely honorific.

frontier near Thessalonica where, in return for the promise of Byzantine help against Hungary, it was agreed that those places taken by Syrgiannes should revert to the Empire.

Andronicus needed them, for Stephen made it abundantly clear that all his other conquests of the past two years - and they included Ochrid, Prilep, Strumica and even Vodena (the modern Edhessa) - were to remain in Serbian hands. A large part of Macedonia was now lost for ever. The final collapse had begun.

In Asia Minor it was proceeding apace. When, at the end of May 1329, reports reached Constantinople that the Ottoman Turks under Orhan were blockading Nicaea, the Emperor and John Cantacuzenus crossed the straits to Chalcedon with an army of some four thousand and advanced south-eastwards along the shore of the Marmara. On the third morning of their march they spied the Turkish army encamped in the hills above the little village of Pelekanos (now Manyas). As well as being far more strategically placed, it appeared to be about twice the size of their own; but after a brief council of war they decided that if Orhan came down on to the plain to meet them they would stand and fight. He did so; and on 10 June the battle began. It raged all that day, under a sweltering sun, and by evening it seemed that the Byzantines - who had by that time beaten off two major Turkish attacks - had the advantage. Their own casualties, however, were already severe; they knew moreover that Orhan, who had deliberately held back part of his army, would almost certainly fling it against them the next day. Cantacuzenus therefore advised that, as soon as possible after dawn, they should begin a discreet and dignified withdrawal.

So indeed they did; unfortunately some of the younger and less experienced soldiers, driven to distraction by constant harassment from the Turkish archers, broke ranks in order to drive them away. Knowing full well the dangers of such an action, Cantacuzenus wheeled his horse and galloped off in their pursuit; and a moment or two later Andronicus, who had not seen him, did the same. It was just as they had feared. They found the young hotheads surrounded, and in the bitter fighting that followed the Emperor was struck in the thigh. He only just managed to regain the body of the army - his horse, streaming with blood, expired on arrival - and the next day he was returned on a stretcher to Constantinople. The wound proved to be quite superficial; and all would have been well had not some of the soldiers, seeing him carried away, assumed that he had been killed. They panicked, and it was with the greatest difficulty that John Cantacuzenus - who had also had an extremely narrow escape - managed to restore a semblance of order, just in time to fight another engagement against the pursuing Turks outside the walls of Philocrene.

The battle of Pelekanos was the first personal encounter between an Emperor of Byzantium and an Ottoman Emir. It had not been a disaster on the scale of Manzikert, but it had shown beyond any reasonable doubt that the Turkish advance in Asia Minor was unstoppable. If any proof were needed, it was soon forthcoming: Nicaea - the imperial capital just seventy years before - fell on 2 March 1331, Nicomedia six years later. All that remained of the Empire in Asia - apart from one or two Aegean islands - was the occasional isolated town that the Turks had not yet bothered to conquer: Philadelphia for example, and Heraclea on the Black Sea. But none of these had any strategic value and their collapse, as everybody knew, was merely a matter of time. Meanwhile his possession of the entire Asiatic shore of the Marmara enabled Orhan to build up his sea power, with which he now began to subject the European shore to almost continuous attack.

For Andronicus, where the situation to the south and east was concerned, only three small shreds of comfort remained. First, diplomatic relations had been opened with the Turks. In August 1333 he himself had crossed over to Nicomedia. His pretext had been to give encouragement to the besieged city; in fact he had attended a secret meeting with Orhan to discuss a possible treaty of peace, during which he had agreed to pay the Emir an annual tribute in return for leaving the last Byzantine possessions in Asia undisturbed. Second, all the evidence suggested that Orhan, far from being the half-crazed and fanatical barbarian of the popular imagination, was — like his father Othman before him - a reasonable and civilized man. He had made no attempt to impose Islam on the Christians whose lands he had occupied, ordered no reprisals on those who had offered him resistance. After his capture of Nicaea he had allowed all the inhabitants who wished to do so to leave the city, together with their icons and holy relics. (Remarkably few had taken advantage of the offer.) His principal objective was to build a state, as his dying father had enjoined him to do, dedicated to justice, learning and the Muslim faith but embracing people of all races and creeds. Conversion and conquest were secondary concerns; they came in their own good time — and time, he knew, was on his side.

The last circumstance from which some consolation could be drawn was a distinct strengthening of Byza
ntine power in the Aegean. From
the moment of his accession Andronicus had begun to rebuild his navy, and within a few years Byzantine ships were once again making the Empire's presence felt among the islands. It was probably thanks to them that Chios rebelled in 1329 against the Genoese family of Zaccaria - who had ruled it for the past quarter of a century - and returned to the imperial fold. Almost equally important was the mainland city of New Phocaea
1
at the northern entrance to the bay of Smyrna (Izmir), to which the Emperor sailed from Chios at the end of the same year to accept an oath of allegiance. Unfortunately Genoa was not the only Western power involved in the eastern Mediterranean. The Knights of St John from their castle in Rhodes, the Venetians, the Lusignans of Cyprus
2
and other families like the Zaccaria — several of whom had ruled in individual islands since the Fourth Crusade - were all pursuing their own interests. One interest, however, they had in common: that of delivering the area from the depredations of the Turkish emirates along the coast.

Not surprisingly, therefore, the idea was put forward - and fervently espoused by Pope John XXII in Avignon
3
- of a great Christian League which would deal first of all with the Muslim pirates and then advance through Asia Minor to the Holy Land in a full-blown Crusade. But here was another problem: what part would Byzantium play? On this point, though Venice and the Knights — the two most enthusiastic proponents of the expedition - welcomed imperial participation, the Pope remained firm. For as long as the Empire was determined to remain schismatic, he insisted, it could on no account be a member of the League.

It was the same old story: even after the debacle following the Council of Lyon, the Papacy was still unable to accept the fact that the schism could not be ended by a stroke of the imperial pen. Andronicus III himself would have had no insuperable objections to reunion; but he was certainly not going to repeat the mistake of his great-grandfather by attempting to impose it from above. In any case, the Pope's attitude did not really interest him. He did not believe in Crusades; his people never

1
Phocaea (now Foca) had been tragically looted by the Catalans in
1507
or
1308.
They stole,
inter alia,
a piece of the Holy Cross, a shirt made by the Virgin for St John, and the latter's own manuscript of the Book of Revelation.

2Cyprus had fallen to Richard Coeur-de
-Lion on his way to the Third Crusade. He had passed it first to the Templars and then, in
1192,
to the French house of Lusignan.

3The Papacy had moved its se
at to Avignon in
1307.
It was to remain there for the next seventy years.

had, and history had proved them right. His own preoccupations were domestic: the defence of his capital and his Empire - objectives for which, as he knew all too well, the nations of the West would have little sympathy. For him, in any case, the Genoese were far more troublesome than the Turks; only six years after their loss of Chios, in the late autumn of 1335, they evened the score with the capture of Lesbos. Andronicus retaliated by ordering the immediate destruction of the defences of Galata, across the Horn from Constantinople. Then he and John Cantacuzenus sailed for the Aegean to negotiate a new alliance -with Umur Pasha, Emir of Aydin.

Umur, known as 'the Lion of God' and subject of one of the great epic poems of Turkish literature,
1
was a typical Ghazi, a 'Warrior for the Faith' who spent his life harassing the Christians - principally the Genoese, the Venetians and the Knights of St John — around the islands of the Aegean and even, in 1332 and 1333, as far as Euboea and the Greek mainland. He particularly disliked the Genoese and warmly welcomed the Byzantine proposals, as a result of which a combined Byzantine and Turkish fleet was to reconquer Lesbos in 1336. Later, as we shall see, he was also to contribute considerable numbers of trained fighting men for the Emperor's European campaigns. But the negotiations led to more than just an alliance: they resulted in a life-long friendship between the Emir and John Cantacuzenus. And the importance of that friendship was to prove, in the years to come, infinitely greater than either could have suspected.

The only major territorial success that Andronicus and Cantacuzenus could record - though that too was to prove sadly fleeting - was in Thessaly and Epirus. As long ago as 1318, the last representatives of the ruling dynasties of these two Greek states had died within a few months of each other: John II of Thessaly unremarkably enough, Thomas of Epirus murdered - as we have seen
2
- by his nephew Nicholas Orsini, who succeeded him both on the throne and in the bed of his widow, Andronicus Ill's sister Anna. After John's death Thessaly disintegrated. Most of it was torn apart by Catalans, Venetians and various local barons, all out for what they could get; only a relatively small corner, in the north-west between Trikkala and Kastoria, was peaceably governed by a certain Stephen Gabrielopulus Melissenus - who, since he

1
The
Destan,
written in the
1460s
by the poet Enver.

bore the title of
sebastocrator,
had presumably been empowered by the Emperor to do so. But in 1333 he died in his turn, and this region too was faced with anarchy. The situation was saved by the Emperor himself - who was fortunately in Macedonia at the time - and the Governor of Thessalonica, Michael Monomachus. Both hurried with their armies to the threatened area, where they drove off the Despot of Epirus - John Orsini, who had murdered his brother Nicholas in 1323 - and rapidly re-established imperial rule as far south as the Catalan border.

With Thessaly back within the Empire, it was clearly only a matter of time before Epirus followed. The family of Orsini had never been generally accepted as legitimate rulers; and the consequent internal struggles, combined with incessant attacks from outside, had brought the once-prosperous despotate to the point of collapse. The already powerful pro-Byzantine party in Arta numbered among its leaders the Despot's wife Anna;
1
and in 1335, encouraged by recent events in Thessaly, she poisoned her husband — it was the third murder of an Orsini by an Orsini in seventeen years - and herself assumed the regency on behalf of her seven-year-old son Nicephorus. Two years later, when the Emperor returned to the region to put down an Albanian revolt, Anna sent a deputation to him at Berat proposing an arrangement whereby she and Nicephorus would continue to reign in Epirus in return for recognizing him as their suzerain; but Andronicus would have none of it. Epirus had now been an independent Despotate for over 130 years; henceforth, he insisted, it must be administered by an imperial Governor, responsible directly to himself. Then and there he appointed to the new post one of his closest friends and companions-in-arms, the
protostrator
Theodore Synadenus, who had been one of the leaders of the
coup
against his grandfather nine years before. Anna, her son and her two little daughters were given a property in Thessalonica, there to live out their lives in comfortable exile.

As so often in Byzantine history, however, things did not go altogether according to plan. Suddenly young Nicephorus disappeared - and was found to have been abducted by certain members of the Epirot nobility, almost certainly with the collusion of those Western powers who had an interest in the continuation of the independent Despotate. Carried off to Italy, he was finally delivered to the court of Catharine of Valois,

1
She was herself a Greek, the daug
hter of another Andronicus Palae
ologus - not the Emperor but one of the Byzantine commanders in the area.