Decline & Fall - Byzantium 03 (56 page)

It scarcely mattered when, a few months later, the same Turks destroyed a joint Serbian-Bulgarian ar
my on the frozen Maritsa river;
they were then fighting, ostensibly at least, as perfectly legitimate mercenaries against a foreign enemy. But those earlier atrocities were something altogether different; and from his association with them, whether deliberate or accidental, the reputation of John Cantacuzenus never recovered. Even in Constantinople it was now in rapid decline. After all, the people reminded themselves, he was not of the true imperial family: even if he had not actually usurped the throne, he was in a sense only a caretaker Emperor. Now that young John Palaeologus had grown to manhood, was it right that he should still be obliged to share his authority - and to share it with a man who, in recent years, had brought the Empire little but disaster?

By this time John VI had probably lost all appetite for power. Already in 1341 he had bought himself a plot of land from the monastery of Vatopedi on Mount Athos, and in 1350 he had made a handsome endowment to the monastery of St George at Mangana; since then he had often spoken wistfully of the attractions of the monastic life. From the first, too, he had supported the legitimate claims of John Palaeologus, whom he could easily have overthrown - as many of his friends had advised - after the death of Andronicus III. But had young John not now proved that he could not be trusted? And had he not, moreover, shown himself to be a serious threat to the survival of the Empire itself - a ready tool of the Venetians, the Bulgars and of Stephen Dushan, one who possessed neither the judgement to perceive the dangers they represented nor the strength to resist their blandishments? In April 1353, on the advice of a body of his supporters in Constantinople, John Cantacuzenus performed an act which, six years before at his coronation, would have been to him unthinkable. At a public ceremony in ?he Palace of Blachernae, he declared John V formally deposed and named his son Matthew co-Emperor in his stead — making it clear, however, that the Palaeologi had been in no sense disinherited and that John's son Andronicus (who was of course a Cantacuzenus on his mother's side) remained as heir apparent. He then exiled his unfortunate son-in-law, with his family, to Tenedos.

Not for the first time, however, he had underestimated the strength of the opposition. Patriarch Callistus, a firm adherent of John V, flatly refused to perform Matthew's coronation. Instead, he pronounced sentence of excommunication on Cantacuzenus, then resigned his office and retired to a monastery. A few days later he slipped across to Galata and with Genoese help soon found his way to Tenedos, where the deposed Emperor gave him a warm welcome. Meanwhile a certain Philotheus, formerly Bishop of Heraclea, was elected as his successor. He, predictably enough, proved to be an enthusiastic Cantacuzenist; but it was not until February 1354 that Matthew and his wife Irene were finally crowned, and even then the ceremony took place not in St Sophia, as might have been expected, but in the church of the Virgin at Blachernae.

Less than a month later, on 2 March, a large part of Thrace was ravaged by a violent earthquake. Hundreds of towns and villages were destroyed; during the blizzards and deluges of rain which followed, many of the survivors died of cold and exposure. In the once-great city of Gallipoli -from which, fortunately, most of the population had managed to escape by sea - scarcely a house was left standing. The disaster would have been terrible enough by any standards; it was however made still more catastrophic by the conduct of the Turks - both the marauding bands of irregulars who had made Thrace their home and the more disciplined troops of Suleyman Pasha across th
e straits in Asia Minor. For Su
leyman himself, it provided precisely the opportunity for which he had been waiting. When the news was brought to him at Pegae he set off at once for the stricken lands, taking with him as many Turkish families as he could find to install in the abandoned towns. The majority headed for the ruins of Gallipoli itself, whither many more of their compatriots were shortly afterwards brought to join them; and within a few months the city had been repaired, with its walls rebuilt and an exclusively Turkish population resident where a Greek one had been before.

For the Empire, this first settlement by the Turks on the European continent was a calamity greater even than the earthquake itself. The devastated areas would sooner or later recover; Gallipoli - the principal crossing-point for travellers bound from Thrace to Asia Minor - seemed permanently lost. To John VI's formal demand for its restitution, Suleyman replied that the city had fallen to him through the will of Allah; to return it would be an act of impious ingratitude. He had not after all taken it by force; his men had simply occupied a place that had been abandoned by its former inhabitants. Such was the Emperor's anxiety to regain Gallipoli that he quadrupled the amount of compensation he had first suggested, but the Pasha remained obdurate. John then appealed to Orhan, who agreed to meet him near Nicomedia to discuss the matter; John arrived, however, to find only a message awaiting him to the effect that the Emir had suddenly been taken ill and was unable to make the journey.

By now John Cantacuzenus must
have felt that his own God had
forsaken him. More than ever he must have longed to put his worldly cares behind him and retire, before it was too late, to the life of prayer and contemplation for which he longed, enabling him to make his peace with his Creator and pass his remaining years in tranquillity. Some time during the summer, with a faint hope in his heart that he might be able to come to some arrangement with his Christian son-in-law, he sailed to Tenedos; but the islanders would not even service his ships, and John Palaeologus - knowing that time was on his side - refused point-blank to receive him. Sadly he returned to Constantinople, there to await the developments that he was powerless now to control.

They were not long in coming. On 21 November 1354 John Palaeologus slipped out of Tenedos. It was a dark, moonless night with occasional bursts of heavy rain, but there was a good following wind that drove him quickly up the Hellespont and into the Marmara. In the early hours of the 22nd he reached Constantinople which, still under cover of darkness, he succeeded in entering unobserved. Once inside the city, however, he immediately made his presence known, and by dawn the crowds were already gathering in the streets and calling his name. Before long, inevitably, they went on the rampage. Again the family mansion of John Cantacuzenus was plundered and set on fire; the houses of many of his supporters suffered a similar fate. Some of the rioters seized control of the arsenal; others marched on Blachernae. John V, meanwhile, temporarily installed himself in the old Palace of the Emperors opposite St Sophia.

It was from there, on 24 November, that he sent a messenger to his father-in-law suggesting a meeting; and in the negotiations that followed he showed himself surprisingly understanding of the latter's position. He did not insist on his abdication; rather he proposed that the two should rule jointly as before, with Matthew Cantacuzenus continuing to reign from Adrianople over his own territory until his death. John VI would be obliged to surrender the fortress at the Golden Gate which he had recently rebuilt and strengthened, and which he had garrisoned with a regiment of Catalan mercenaries; but he would remain the senior Emperor and would continue to live at Blachernae, while John V would occupy the private palace of Theodore Metochites, one of the largest and grandest in the city.

The immediate crisis was over, and the two Emperors swore a solemn oath to observe the agreement that they had made. Many problems, however, remained unsolved. One w
as the continued presence of Suley
man's Turks in Thrace; another was the increasing unpopularity of John

Cantacuzenus, of which he himself was fully aware. He knew too that such supporters as he had, discouraged by the open hostility shown them throughout the capital, were rapidly falling away. For about a week he bore the situation as best he could; then, after a particularly violent demonstration against him, he finally took the decision that he had been considering for so long. On 4 December, at a ceremony in Blachernae, he solemnly laid aside the diadem, divesting himself too of the dalmatic and the purple buskins, embroidered with golden eagles, which only Emperors might wear. In their place he adopted the simple black robe of an Orthodox monk. His wife Irene similarly put off her imperial pomp to become a nun at the convent of Kyria Martha, which had been founded in the 1270s by Maria Palaeologina, sister of Michael VIII, and in which her mother-in-law Theodora Cantacuzena lay buried. He himself retired first to the monastery of St George at Mangana, later moving to another, smaller foundation which had recently been established by his old friend and supporter John Charsianeites, from whom it took its name.

John Cantacuzenus - known henceforth as the monk Joasaph - had been Emperor only seven years; but he had effectively governed the Empire for a quarter of a century, and guided it for ten years longer still. He was to live for another twenty-nine, until 1383. The first years after his retirement were largely devoted to the completion of his
Histories,
which continue until 1356. When this work was done he turned to theology, and to a long and closely-reasoned defence of the hesychast doctrine. As we shall soon see, however, he did not altogether withdraw from political life, much as he may have wished to do so.

Many historians — Edward Gibbon among them — have cast doubts on John's sincerity. Was his abdication, they ask, really as voluntary as he pretends? Was he not in fact driven from the throne by his ambitious young son-in-law? There is no reason to think so. All his life John had been a deeply religious man. For fifteen years at least he had been dreaming of just such a withdrawal; and the humiliations and disappointments that he had recently suffered were surely more than enough to persuade him to take the step he had contemplated for so long. His subjects, all too clearly, had no further use for him. He had made his peace with his son-in-law John V, whose right to the throne was far greater than his own and who had by now made at least some demonstration of his ability to rule the Empire. If he were ever to abdicate, this surely was the moment to go.

It is hard not to feel sorry for John Cantacuzenus. Few Emperors had worked harder for the imperial good; few had possessed less personal ambition. He might, had he so wished, have been co-Emperor with Andronicus III in the 1330s, and certainly on Andronicus's death the throne had been his for the asking; but he had always refused. Only after the Empire had been torn apart by civil war had he assumed the diadem, and even then with genuine reluctance; and he would never have deposed John Palaeologus, nominating his own son in his place, had he not been genuinely convinced that John, by resuming that war, was throwing the whole future of Byzantium into jeopardy. Unfortunately, this moment of self-assertion had come too late. Had he shown it in 1341, he might well have held the Empire together and spared its citizens thirteen years of misery. By 1353 the damage had been done.

Luck, too, was against him. The foolhardiness of John Palaeologus, the hesychast controversy, the Black Death, the aggression of the Turks, the ambitions of the Genoese and the Venetians: without any of these afflictions, he might conceivably have won through. Together, they made his task impossible. The greatest burden of all, however, was the bankruptcy of the Empire itself - a bankruptcy as much moral as financial. Not only was the treasury empty; the Byzantines themselves had lost heart. Their old self-confidence was gone, and with it the will to recover their past greatness. A truly charismatic personality might perhaps have been able to galvanize them into action; but John Cantacuzenus, wise statesman and excellent general as he had been, was primarily a scholar and an intellectual; he was not ultimately an inspired leader of men. Instead of enthusing his subjects with determination and courage, he had succeeded only in alienating their affection and their trust. Thirty-five years of dedicated service to the Empire had been ill repaid. As he and his wife exchanged the trappings of Empire for their coarse monastic habits, it is hard to believe that they can have done so with anything but relief.

20

The Sultan's Vassal

[1354-91
]

The Tsar chose a heavenly kingdom

And not an earthly kingdom.

He built a church on Kosovo.

He built it not with floor of marble

But laid down silk and scarlet on the ground.

There he summoned the Patriarch of Serbia

And twelve great bishops.

Then he gave the soldiers the Eucharist and their battle orders.

In that same hour that the Prince gave orders to his soldiers

The Turks attacked Kosovo . . .

Then the Turks overwhelmed Lazar,

And the Tsar Lazar was destroyed,

And his army was destroyed with him,