Decline & Fall - Byzantium 03 (54 page)

He had other misfortunes too, and one of them was to be a contemporary of Stephen Dushan, the self-styled Emperor of the Serbs and the Greeks. It was Stephen who had been the real beneficiary of the civil

war, brilliantly playing one side against the other and taking every advantage of the weakness of the regency and the Cantacuzenists alike. After his capture of Serres in September 1345 he was master of virtually all Macedonia except Thessalonica itself; only a month later we find him describing himself - in a document addressed to the Doge of Venice - as
fere totius imperii romani dominus,
'Lord of almost the whole Roman Empire'; and, as this title implies, he had no intention of stopping at Macedonia. In the years that followed he was also to conquer Albania and Epirus, Acarnania and Aetolia, and finally Thessaly - all of them at the cost of only a few short sieges and without fighting a single major battle. By the time of his death in 1355 his Empire extended from the Adriatic to the Aegean and from the Danube to the Gulf of Corinth, a territory many times larger than that which now remained to Byzantium.

By then, too, he was almost a Greek himself. His people had long since cast off their barbarian image. Andronicus IPs Logothete Theodore Metochites, visiting the Serbian capital on diplomatic business as early as 1298, had been deeply impressed not only by the luxury of the court but by its strong Byzantine flavour; and during the intervening half-century the hellenizing process had continued apace. Dushan ruled the southern part of his Empire from Greece, leaving his son - the later Stephen Urosh V, but still only a child - in nominal charge of the Serbian lands in the north; he himself spoke fluent Greek, integrated Greek officials into his administration and gave them Greek titles. Nor, when necessary, did he hesitate to adopt Greek institutions: the
Syntagma,
or manual of law, by the Byzantine canonist Matthew Blastares formed the basis for a considerable part of the new legislative code which he first promulgated in 1349 to put his new Empire on a sound legal footing.

There can be no question but that the ambitions of Stephen Dushan were fixed on the throne of Constantinople, and little doubt that he would have achieved them but for a single weakness: Serbia had always been a land-locked Kingdom, and even after his maritime conquests he had no effective navy. The more parlous the situation of the Empire, the more essential was the maintenance of the Land Walls of the capital; and despite the ravages of the civil war this tremendous bastion was still as impregnable as ever it had been. It followed that Constantinople could be successfully attacked only from the seaward side; and without a fleet Dushan was as powerless to conquer the city as his great predecessor Symeon had been more than four centu
ries before. Again and again he
tried to ally himself with Venice for the final onslaught, but the Venetians always rejected his advances; they had no wish to replace the weak Byzantine Empire with a powerful Serbian one.

Yet Stephen Dushan represented neither the beginning nor the end of the misfortunes of John VI - who, in the very first year of his reign, was called upon to face an enemy more implacable by far than any number of Balkan rivals. In the spring of 1347 Constantinople was stricken by the Black Death, brought almost certainly by ships escaping from the already plague-ridden Genoese colony of Caffa in the Crimea, which was then under siege by the Mongols. The city had suffered similar visitations in plenty over the centuries, but never one so virulent or on such a scale. We need not necessarily believe - though our local so
urces give no stati
stics to contradict him - the anonymous contemporary chronicler from the Italian town of Este, who claims that in Constantinople it accounted for eight-ninths of the entire population; to the Byzantines, however, already broken in spirit by two civil wars in a single generation, it must have seemed the final proof of what they had suspected for so long: that the Holy Virgin, their patron and protectress, had, more than a thousand years, at last deserted them.

Less dramatic than the progress of the Serbian Emperor or the spread of the Black Death, but equally disturbing for John Cantacuzenus, was the general situation of the Empire. Once upon a time it had extended from the Straits of Gibraltar to Mesopotamia; now it was limited to the former province of Thrace - with the two vital cities of Adrianople and Didymotichum - and a few islands in the northern Aegean (though not Chios, which had been retaken by the Genoese in 1346). To this pathetic rump could be added, after 1350, the city of Thessalonica, which finally rid itself of the Zealots in that year; but Thessalonica was now a tiny Byzantine enclave within the dominions of Stephen Dushan, accessible only by sea.

Economically, the position was still more catastrophic: the civil war had reduced the Thracian countryside to a desert in which no farming was possible and which was moreover under constant harassment by marauding bands of Turks, while the coast was under continual attack by pirates from the Emirates of Asia Minor. Such food as was available was brought in from the Black Sea by the Genoese, who could cut off supplies whenever they liked. Trade, too, was at a standstill: Gregoras tells us that whereas the Genoese customs in Galata were collecting

200,000
hyperpyra
a year, across the Golden Horn in Constantinople the corresponding figure was a mere 30,000 - and the
hyperpyron
itself was losing value with every day that passed. Any major expenditure by the government was made possible only by appeals for gifts or loans, which were all too often directed away from their stated purpose. When around 1350 Symeon, Grand Duke of Muscovy, sent a large quantity of gold for the restoration of St Sophia after its recent collapse, this magnificent contribution to a Christian cause found its way almost immediately into Muslim pockets: it was spent on the recruitment of Turkish mercenaries.

John's first care was to consolidate those parts of the Empire that still remained. His youngest son, Andronicus, had been carried off by the Black Death; of the two remaining, the elder, Matthew, was made responsible for an extensive area of Thrace between Didymotichum and Christopolis, along the Serbian frontier; the younger, Manuel, was a little later given charge of the Morea, henceforth to be considered as an autonomous despotate. It has been suggested. that in making these appointments John was simply finding a useful occupation for two potentially headstrong princes, but such an interpretation seems to do him - and them - less than justice. Stephen Dushan, he well knew, would not rest until he had brought both these areas under his own control; and he knew too how easy it was for imperial territories to break away when under pressure. Since the civil war, there were few personal loyalties left among the leading Byzantines; in conferring these posts on his sons he was very sensibly putting the two key areas of his diminished Empire into the hands of men he could trust.

Next he looked towards Galata and the Genoese, who were simultaneously holding the Empire up to ransom and draining its economy dry. But nothing could be done against them without a fleet - of merchantmen as well as war galleys - and there was no money to build one. The rich — and the word can henceforth be used only in its comparative sense - were appealed to for funds, but largely in vain: by now they had all lost the bulk of their fortunes, and they were too despondent and generally apathetic to make further sacrifices. Only with enormous difficulty did the Emperor manage to raise a hopelessly inadequate 50,000
hyperpyra
with which to launch his programme. Then there was the problem of the customs dues. It was clearly intolerable that the annual receipts in Galata should be nearly seven times those in Constantinople, and to remedy the situation John decreed a dramatic reduction of import tariffs to the point where
foreign vessels were once again
attracted to the western, rather than the eastern bank of the Golden Horn.

Not surprisingly, the Genoese lodged a strong protest; and when this was ignored they had no hesitation in resorting to force. In August 1348 a flotilla of their ships sailed across the Horn, burning the few Byzantine vessels they could find. John Cantacuzenus was away in Thrace; his wife Irene, however, with her younger son Manuel and her son-in-law Nicephorus - husband of their daughter Maria
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— inspired a spirited resistance on the part of the entire population of Constantinople. The Genoese warehouses along the shore were set on fire; huge rocks and flaming bales were catapulted into Galata. The fighting continued sporadically for weeks - long enough for the Genoese to send for additional ships and equipment from Chios and to install vast catapults of their own on two of their largest warships. More sinister still, on another vessel they constructed a huge siege tower, higher than the sea walls of the capital. When it was ready, nine smaller ships towed it a
cross the Horn and a fierce battl
e took place against the walls; at one stage it looked as if the city were about to suffer a major invasion.

But the Genoese had underestimated their opponents. The people of Constantinople fought like tigers for their city; even the slaves, writes Gregoras, were given weapons by their masters and taught themselves the use of bows and arrows. Finally the whole tower collapsed and the would-be invaders were forced to withdraw with heavy casualties to Galata, whence on the following day they sent ambassadors to Irene to sue for peace. But the Byzantines' blood was up; and when the Emperor returned on 1 October he gave orders for the stepping-up of the shipbuilding programme, the money to be provided - compulsorily if necessary - from the citizens not only of Constantinople but from all over Thrace. The timber from the Thracian forests had, we are told, to be transported overland in huge ox-wagons; the Empire possessed no vessels capable of carrying them, and the sea routes were anyway controlled by the Genoese.

In Galata, meanwhile, major defensive works were in progress. The walls along the Horn — they covered that stretch of the eastern shore running between the present Galata and Atatiirk bridges - were raised and strengthened, and two more converging walls were added, running up the hillside behind to form a fortified triangle. At the apex of this was built a large cylindrical towe
r known as the Tower of Christ,
whic
h - better known as the Galata
Tower - survives today.
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From time to time while the work was in progress, the Genoese would repeat their suggestions for peace talks, but the Emperor still refused to listen: his fleet was now rapidly taking shape, and he was determined to use it.

By the early spring of 1349 it was ready - nine fair-sized ships and about a hundred smaller ones, several of which had been built and equipped by wealthier citizens at their own expense. At the beginning of March the first detachment left its dockyard on the Marmara and sailed to the mouth of the Golden Horn - where, on the evening of the 5 th, it managed to capture and set fire to one of the largest of the Genoese vessels. On the evidence of subsequent events, however, it looks as though this initial triumph may have been more a matter of luck than anything else; for when the rest of the Byzantine ships arrived on the following day they suffered disaster - from which it became evident that their commanders and crews were ignorant of the most fundamental rules of seamanship. Precisely what occurred remains something of a mystery. Did a sudden gale strike the fleet just as it was rounding what is now Seraglio Point into the Golden Horn? Such, certainly, is the testimony of John Cantacuzenus himself and of another eye-witness, an intensely patriotic Byzantine named Alexius Macrembolites; but it hardly explains what happened next. All our contemporary sources, Greek though they are, assert that the whole fleet was suddenly and simultaneously seized with panic, and that soldiers and sailors together hurled themselves lemming-like into the sea before they had even engaged with the enemy. The astonished Genoese first suspected a trick; as they approached, however, they saw that the Byzantine ships were indeed abandoned; all they had to do was to tow them across to Galata.

Can it, one wonders, have been quite as simple as that? Is there really no other explanation for so extraordinary an outbreak of mass hysteria, for cowardice on so gigantic a scale? But if there was a better reason, what could it have been? And even if there was not, if the cause of the whole debacle was indeed nothing but a sudden squall taking inexperienced seamen by surprise, why did the captains not order their crews to lower the sails and ride it out? We shall never know. Of the result, on the other hand, there can be no question. From one moment to the next

1 The guides - and postcards - which claim that the
Tower was built by Justinian are
not to be believed. The building is now used as a restaurant and nightclub. By day and by night, the balcony running round the outside affords one of the most spectacular views in all Istanbul, both across the Golden Horn and up the Bosphorus.

the sea was full of floundering men, some sinking under the weight of their armour, others being carried over by the current to the Galata side, where the Genoese made short work of them. Relatively few managed to reach their home shore in safety.

And even that was not the end of the story. Somehow, the terror spread to those watching the proceedings from the city:

Every spot both inside and outside the walls and gates was packed with people. A trumpeter or a drummer migh
t have inspired them with a littl
e fighting spirit; instead, they stood like corpses, until suddenly they turned and stampeded in flight, trampling over each other while the enemy watched in wonder and amazement, commiserating with the disaster rather than exulting in their victory; for they felt that some evil genius must have been at work, to cause men so freely to sacrifice their lives when there was no one in pursuit.
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