Decline & Fall - Byzantium 03 (63 page)

There the two separated, the Marshal travelling straight on to Paris to prepare for the Emperor's arrival. Manuel remained a few days in Venice before continuing his journey via Padua, Vicenza, Pavia and Milan, where Duke Gian Galeazzo Visconti, its ruler, gave a great banquet in his honour and loaded him with presents, promising to travel himself to Constantinople if the other rulers proved cooperative. It was all a far cry from the sort of treatment that John V had received in Venice in 1370; now, as Manuel moved through Italy, he was cheered and feted in every town through which he passed. The contrast was not altogether surprising. John had visited Venice as a beggar and a discredited debtor; his son was seen as a hero. Italy had at last woken up to the Turkish danger, and in Italian eyes this tall, distinguished figure -having come, as it were, straight from the front line - was the principal defender of Christendom, the potential saviour of Europe.

Something else had happened, too, in the past few years: the Italians had discovered Greek literature and learning, and had taken it to their hearts. Until the last decade of the fourteenth century, Greek had been effectively a dead language in Italy. Petrarch had possessed a Greek manuscript of Homer, on which he would regularly plant a reverent kiss but of which he understood scarcely a word.
1
The study of Greek achieved no real impetus undl 1396, when a pupil of Demetrius Cydones named Manuel Chrysoloras was installed in the newly-founded chair of Greek in Florence. Thenceforth the spark travelled quickly. Early in 1400 Chrysoloras had moved on to Milan - leaving behind him a small but enthusiastic body of Greek-speaking scholars and the first Greek grammar ever to appear in Italy - and was there to greet the Emperor on his arrival. In Milan as elsewhere, Manuel thus found all the educated citizens passionately eager for Greek culture and hanging on his every word. Scholar and intellectual as he was, he did not disappoint them.

On 3 June 1400 - just three weeks short of his fiftieth birthday -Manuel Palaeologus arrived in Paris. King Charles VI wa
s waiti
ng for him at the suburb of Charenton with the snow-white horse on which he

1 He and his pupil Boccaccio had finally and with much difficulty unearthed an old and extremely dirty monk from a remote Basilian monastery in the depths of Calabria and in 1360 had brought him to Florence. Despite his villainous appearance and unpleasant personal habits -Petrarch described him as 'the concierge of the Cretan labyrinth' - Boccaccio had lodged him in his house and set him down to translate the
Iliad;
but before the monk could get very far he was struck by lightning.

was to enter the city. A monk from Saint-Denis, who was an eye-witness of all that took place, was particularly struck by the way Manuel transferred himself directly from one mount to another:

.
..
Then the Emperor, dressed in his imperial robe of white silk, seated himself on the white horse presented to him by the King during his journey, mounting it nimbly without even deigning to set a foot upon the ground. And those who — while ma
rking his moderate stature, disti
nguished by a manly chest and by yet firmer limbs, though under a long beard and showing white hair everywhere - yet took heed of the grace of his countenance, and adjudged him indeed to be worthy of imperial rule.
1

Riding in the centre of a magnificent procession, Manuel was escorted to the old Louvre, where an entire wing had been redecorated to receive him. Lavish entertainments were prepared in his honour; the King himself took him hunting; he was invited to the Sorbonne to meet the country's most distinguished scholars. On every side he was revered and venerated as the Emperor he was. No amount of celebration and festivity could however conceal the fact that he failed to achieve his main object. He had several meetings with the King and his council, in the course of which they agreed to provide him with another force of twelve hundred men for a year, commanded once again by Boucicault; but this, as he and the Marshal well knew, was useless. Nothing would succeed against the Turks but a full-blown international Crusade; and this, apparently, King Charles refused to contemplate.

The situation was not improved by the fact that, within a few weeks of the Emperor's arrival, Charles gave way to one of his periodic fits of insanity, after which all negotiations had to be suspended. Manuel, however, was by this time in correspondence with the Kings of Castile and Aragon, both of whom spoke encouragingly of aid - while remaining somewhat vague about the scale on which it was envisaged. He also made contact with a certain Peter Holt, a prior of the Order of St John, about the possibility of a visit to England. This, Holt pointed out, would not be without its problems: Richard II, with whom he had formerly corresponded, had been deposed in the previous year by the present ruler, King Henry IV; Henry was at present occupied in putting down a rebellion in Scotland; moreover, although England and France were at present temporarily at peace, relations between them were as usual severely strained, and it was far from certain that His Majesty

1
Religieux de
Saint-Denis,
Chronica Karoli sexti,
quoted by J. W. Barker, op. cit.

would wish to receive any ruler, however distinguished, who had so recently enjoyed the hospitality of the French King.

Fortunately, the prior's misgivings proved unfounded; he and Manuel were obliged to spend two frustrating months in Calais, waiting until King Henry had returned from Scotland and was ready to receive them, but in December they finally made the crossing. Stopping for a few days at Canterbury, they reached London four days before Christmas. The King met them at Blackheath and escorted them into the city. Far from showing any coolness towards his guest, he too treated him with the utmost reverence and respect: his own position in the Kingdom was still uncertain - many of his subjects rightly considered him a usurper of the throne, and a probable murderer to boot - and he believed with good reason that to be seen playing host to the Emperor of Byzantium would do much to enhance his prestige. On Christmas Day he entertained his guest to a banquet in his royal palace at Eltham.
1
As in Paris, everyone was deeply impressed by Manuel's dignity, as by the spotless white robes that he and his entourage all wore. Among those present was the lawyer Adam of Usk. 'I reflected,' he wrote, 'how grievous it was that this great Christian prince should be driven by the Saracens from the furthest East to these furthest western islands to seek aid against them . . . O God, what dost thou now, ancient glory of Rome?'
2

The Emperor himself seems to have been equally impressed by King Henry:

There is the ruler with whom we are staying at present, the King of Great Britain
[sic]
which is, one may say, a second universe. He overflows with merits and is bedecked with manifold virtues . . . He is most illustrious both in form and in judgement; with his might he astonishes all, and with his sagacity he wins himself friends. He extends a hand to everyone, and furnishes every sort of assistance to those who are in need of aid. He has established a virtual haven for us in the midst of a twofold tempest, both of the season and of fortune . . . and he appears most pleasant in conversation, gladdening us, honouring us and loving us no less . . . He is to furnish us with military assistance in the shape of men-at-arms, archers, money and ships which will convey the army wherever necessary.

Not all those who knew the King shared his guest's enthusiasm; but

1
The old moated palace of Eltham - a mile or two south-east of Greenwich - still stands. Although a royal palace since the days of Edward III
(1327-77)
it was largely rebuilt by Edward IV in the
1470s;
from this period dates the Great Hall with its tremendous hammerbeam roof. Of the building in which Manuel Palacologus was regally entertained, little or nothing now remains.

2
Cbronicon,
p.
5 7.
Quoted by Runciman,
The Fall of Constantinople,

Henry, powerless as he was to provide the military aid that he so cheerfully promised, seems at least to have shown genuine sympathy with the Byzantine cause. Told of the disappearance of the
3,000
marks contributed by his predecessor, he at once ordered a formal inquiry; and when the peculation was revealed he immediately made good the loss, at the same time presenting Manuel with a further
£4,000
said to have been contributed to the church collection boxes - astonishing testimony to the generosity of the people of England towards a nation which few had ever seen, and of which the vast majority can never even have heard.

After some seven weeks in England, Manuel was back in Paris towards the end of February
1401.
He was to stay there for more than a year, continuing his negotiations with the Kings of Aragon and Portugal, the Pope in Rome and the anti-Pope in Avignon; he also seems to have joined with Charles — who had by now temporarily recovered his sanity -in an attempt to contact the Mongol leader Tamburlaine and to encourage him to lead his immense and apparently invincible horde against Bayezit. Throughout the summer he continued optimistic; several of his surviving letters written from Paris at this time make it clear that he still believed a great international expedition to be in preparation. With the coming of autumn, however, his correspondence grew steadily more discouraging. For the King of Aragon, the season was too far advanced; Henry of England was fully occupied with another rebellion, this time on the part of the Welsh; the Florentines, to whom Manuel had sent his own kinsman Demetrius Palaeologus with a request for aid, sent many expressions of sympathy but pointed out that they had an 'Italian Bayezit' (the Milanese Gian Galeazzo Visconti) of their own to deal with.

Most disappointing of all were the French. They, ideally, should have masterminded the new Crusade, organized it, orchestrated it, given it shape and purpose. But Charles VI was largely incapacitated - no one knew when madness would once again overcome him - and his disease had led to power struggles between various members of his family which paralyzed the government still further. In the autumn of
1401
Marshal Boucicault - who was to have led the new French expedition -was nominated instead as Governor of Genoa, where he arrived at the end of October. Yet even now the Emperor refused to give up hope. A few months later he wrote to Venice, suggesting that Doge Michele Steno might take over the leadership where Charles had failed; but the

Doge prevaricated. Venice, he pointed out, had already gone to considerable expense to help 'the Christians of Romania'. Any further aid must be contingent on similar contributions being made by other nations of the West.

After such reverses, why did the sad and disillusioned Emperor remain in Europe as long as he did? Certainly not, as has been suggested, because he dreaded returning to his capital with the news of his failure. A deeply conscientious man with an unassailable sense of duty, he had not seen his wife and children for nearly two years and would not have wished to stay away from his home and capital for a day longer than he thought necessary. But he was also determined. His father's policy of appeasement had failed; resistance was the only alternative. Somehow it must be made to work; thus, for as long as there seemed the slightest possibility of persuading all or any of the princes of the West to change their minds, he himself must remain among them.

How long he would have done so we shall never know; because in September
1402
the Seigneur Jean de Chateaumorand - whom Boucicault had left in Constantinople with a token force of some three hundred French troops — arrived in Paris with news that instantly changed the entire situation. The Mongols under Tamburlaine had destroyed the Ottoman army. Bayezit himself had been taken prisoner. For Manuel Palaeologus, there was no longer any reason to remain in the West. He began to prepare for his journey home.

22

The Legacy of Tambur
laine

[1402-25]

I shall be as a son to you if you will be my father. From henceforth let there be no rivalry or differences between us.

Prince Suleyman to the Emperor John VII

For most of the time that Manuel Palaeologus had been absent from Constantinople, the capital had remained in a state of siege. His nephew John VII had done his best, and was th
roughout valiantly supported by
Chateaumorand and his French troops, who would make periodic foraging sorties outside the walls under cover of night or while the besiegers were otherwise off their guard. Without them, the city might well have fallen half a century earlier than it did, for Bayezit was in arrogant mood. We read in one anonymous account of how, gazing covetously across at the great churches and palaces, he mentally decided on a use or an occupant for each: for himself, he proposed to take over St Sophia as his official residence. Meanwhile he had kept up the pressure and at one moment - probably in the summer or autumn of
1401
- had sent John an ultimatum:

If I have indeed driven the Basileus Manuel from the city, I have done so not for your sake but for my own
...
If then you wish to be our friend, withdraw from thence and I will give you whatever province you may choose. But if you do not, then, with God and his great Prophet as my witnesses, I will spare no one, but all will I utterly destroy . . .