VI
At this same time the emirs whose possessions bordered on the Aegaean Sea began to press hard upon the Greek coast cities and those few cities of the interior, such as Magnesia, Philadelphia, and Sardes, which still acknowledged the authority of Byzantium. In the spring of 1302, Michael IX Palaeologos came to Asia Minor to take command of the Slavic mercenaries. At first the Turks were in consternation, if we can believe Pachymeres, but when they saw the unwillingness of Michael to fight, they grew bold, and compelled the Emperor to take refuge in Magnesia. Michael’s unwillingness was not due to lack of courage, but because he could not rely upon his Slavs. As true mercenaries, they were fighting for pay, and there was no gold to give them. Michael’s father, the old Emperor Andronicus II, had not sent him any money. In Constantinople the Venetians were threatening to depose Andronicus; the almost annual ecclesiastical quarrels, which form so large and wearisome and disastrous a place in the last century and a half of Byzantine history, were embarrassing him; and the treasury was empty. Even if there had been money to send, it would have been a perilous undertaking, for the Turkish pirates were swarming in the Sea of Marmora, and had even seized the Princes’ Islands, which are within sight of the Imperial City.
When they saw that neither pay nor booty was forthcoming, and that they were engaged in a hopeless struggle, the mercenaries forced Michael to allow them to return to Europe. This was the last genuine personal effort on the part of a successor of the Caesars to save the Asiatic themes. It ended in ignominious failure. Not one battle had been fought. The withdrawal of the Slavs was followed by an exodus of Greeks to the Aegaean coast, and from there to Europe. Pachymeres claims that this exodus was general. But we cannot accept the testimony of Pachymeres as altogether trustworthy on this point. Many Greeks, for reasons which are set forth later, remained in the coast districts of Asia Minor, and they did not leave, to any noticeable extent, the territory in which Osman was operating. The Turks, however, made a raid into all the islands along the Aegaean littoral, and crossed over into Thrace, where for two years the fields could not be cultivated.[50]
At this critical moment, had there been any united action on the part of the Turkish emirs, Constantinople would probably have fallen an easy prey to their armies and to their fleets. But each emir was acting for himself, and was as much an enemy of his Turkish rivals as he was of the Byzantine emperors. There is no instance in which any two of them joined forces, and acted together. Throughout the fourteenth century the armies defending the Byzantine Empire contained almost as many Turks as those attacking it.
To the east and to the west Andronicus II, utterly unable to defend himself, looked for aid. From this time on to the fall of Constantinople the history of the Byzantine Empire becomes what the history of the Ottoman Empire has been during the last hundred years. It is the story of an uninterrupted succession of bitter internal quarrels, of attacks by former vassals upon the immediate frontiers of its shrunken territory, of subtle undermining by hostile colonies of foreigners whose one thought was commercial gain, and of intermittent, and in almost all cases selfishly inspired, efforts of western Europe to put off the fatal day.
In the east, Andronicus expected much of Ghazan Khan. Were not the Turks of Asia Minor vassals of the Mongol overlord? Andronicus sent envoys to Ghazan to offer him the hand of a young princess who passed at Constantinople as his natural daughter. Ghazan received them cordially, accepted the proffered marriage alliance, and promised to exercise a pressure upon the Turks of western Asia Minor.[51] This promise, however, was not followed by any serious action. The Mongols were never more than mere raiders in Asia Minor.[52] Before this marriage could be consummated, Ghazan Khan died. The young princess was offered to and accepted by his successor. It was a useless sacrifice. For in this first decade of the fourteenth century the long struggle between Christian and Moslem to win the Mongols ended, temporarily at least, in the conversion of the Khans to Islam.[53]
From the west, Andronicus received aid of the most disastrous sort. When Ferdinand of Aragon made peace with Charles d’Anjou, King of Sicily, in 1302, he got rid of his troublesome mercenaries by sending them to serve the Byzantine Empire. Roger de Flor, typical soldier of fortune, who could not be matched in his generation for daring, insolence, rapacity, cruelty, and Achillean belief in his own invulnerability, arrived at Constantinople with eight thousand Catalans and Almogavares, the former heavy-armed plainsmen and mariners, the latter light-armed mountaineers of northern Spain. They were true prototypes of the soldiers of Alva and Cortes. Roger was made Grand Duke, and married to Princess Marie, niece of Andronicus.
Almost immediately after their arrival, the Catalans became engaged in such bloody conflicts with the Genoese of Galata, and robbed and murdered the Greeks with such alacrity, that Andronicus hastened to turn them loose in Asia. Roger established himself in the peninsula of Cyzicus. Here his Catalans fell immediately to plundering the inhabitants of the country, who soon found that they had passed from Scylla to Charybdis, and carried heartrending tales of lust and greed and massacre to Constantinople.[54] The one Greek general who was doing anything noteworthy against the Turks was relieved of his spoils of war by Roger.
In 1305, by a swift march to the relief of Philadelphia, which was being besieged by Alisur, prince of Karamania, Roger and his Catalans showed what they could do, if they would. The Turks were compelled to raise the siege. Roger pursued them to the source of the Sangarius.[55] But, on the way, the Catalans deprived their Greek allies of any portion of the rich spoils, and massacred the Slavic mercenaries who dared to argue with them.[56] Gregoras says, probably with reason, that Roger could have reconquered the whole of Asia Minor for the Byzantines.[57] But that country seemed to attract him as little as it had attracted the Mongols. He was no Crusader, glad and eager to undergo the terrible hardships which military operations among mountains and on arid plateaus demanded. There was no motive to make the effort worth while. So he left the Turks to themselves and went to Gallipoli, where he let it be known that the Catalans were preparing an expedition to repeat the Fourth Crusade.
In fear for his life as well as for his throne, Andronicus sent an envoy to offer Roger the ‘government of the Orient’, general command of all the troops in Asia, and twenty thousand pieces of gold. For full measure he added enough wheat to nourish the Catalans for a year. The ‘government of the Orient’ was as empty and meaningless a gift as the supposed ‘grants’ of the Seljuk Sultan Alaeddin to the Turkish nomad chieftains. The only troops who could go into Asia and accomplish anything were already under Roger’s command. But the gold, which might have worked a charm, was left behind, as the envoy was afraid to bring it. Roger scorned the emperor’s offer. Ten days later he repented, and accepted from Emperor Andronicus thirty thousand pieces of gold, one hundred thousand measures of wheat, and the title of Caesar. In return for these princely gifts he had only to promise to lead three thousand men against the Turks.
But a host of Spaniards, long before the discovery of America, were already in search of ‘El Dorado’. They poured into Gallipoli on every merchant ship from the West, and made the Byzantines begin to fear Roger more than they feared the Turks. The remedy was getting to be worse than the evil! Before leaving for his campaign, Roger rashly went to Adrianople to pay his respects to the young Emperor Michael IX, who was holding his court there. On the threshold of Michael’s bedchamber, like the Duke of Guise at Blois, he was stabbed to death. A massacre of his attendants followed.
A train of evils fell upon Macedonia and Thrace as a result of the assassination of Roger de Flor. Michael soon had reason to regret this ill-advised deed. Not only did the Catalans, in their first access of fury, avenge the death of their great leader and their comrades by unspeakable cruelties and by the destruction of every village which they came upon, not only did they defeat the young emperor in open battle and almost capture him as he fled from the field, but they invited over from Asia Minor into Macedonia all the Turks who could be induced to come.
At Gallipoli the Catalans tried to form a state. It failed owing to dissensions among their leaders. Their raids into Thrace had so ruined that country that they themselves began to starve. So they started upon an odyssey into Macedonia, where the common soldiers, wearied of the civil strife engendered by their leaders, who were continually ordering them to cut each other’s throats, decided to make an end of these costly personal jealousies. They killed the nobles who led them, and marched south into Thessaly. Gauthier de la Brienne committed the imprudence of seeking their aid in Athens. In 1310 they killed Brienne, set up in Athens a military democracy, and started to revive the Peloponnesian Wars.[58]
The further fortunes of the Grand Catalan Company do not come within the limits of our work. Roger and the Catalans, for that matter, were never in direct contact with the Osmanlis. But it was necessary to give a brief statement of their services to the Byzantine Empire in order that we might have a proper appreciation of their services to the Ottoman Empire. When they withdrew into Thessaly they had left the Turks behind them in Thrace and Macedonia. To the unhappy emperor who had received them nine years before as saviours of the Empire, this was their legacy.
Owing to the adroit leadership of their chief, Halil, and to the impotence of Michael, whose Slavic mercenaries had deserted him and withdrawn into Bulgaria, these Turks were soon able to throw Macedonia and Thrace into so great anarchy that communication by land between Salonika and the capital was no longer safe.[59] And yet Halil had only eighteen hundred men under his command! In 1311, shortly after the Catalans had left, Halil concluded with Andronicus and Michael an agreement by which he and his companions in arms were to have a safe-conduct and free passage across the Hellespont. But the Greeks, in violation of one of the most important points of this arrangement, attempted to take from the Turks their booty. Halil, instead of quitting European soil, sent for reinforcements. The imperial army suffered a decisive defeat, and Michael fled, having abandoned his personal baggage. In insolent triumph, Halil adorned himself with the imperial insignia.[60] All the region around the Hellespont and the Gulf of Saros remained for three years without cultivation. So desperate did the situation become that Michael was compelled to seek aid of the Genoese and the Serbians. In 1314 the Turks of Halil were entrapped near Gallipoli and massacred. But at what a price! The Serbians, whose co-operation had won the day for the Greeks, saw eastern Macedonia and the open sea. They liked it. New troubles began to brew for the Byzantines.
There were other long-standing troubles threatening from abroad. In the East, the Mongols had overrun southern Russia, and were as great a nightmare to Andronicus as the Goths had formerly been to Valens. The rulers of Constantinople did not hesitate to purchase security on the Black Sea by truces, which were sealed with the sacrifice of purple-born princesses to pagan harems, and by humble protestations of friendship to khans who treated the imperial ambassadors as the envoys of a vassal.[61]
In the West, another sword of Damocles was hanging over the emperors of Byzantium. We must remember that the Greeks had been in possession of their capital again only since 1260, and that the heirs of the Frankish emperors still cherished the dream of a Latin re-establishment at Constantinople. In 1305, on the very day Clement V mounted the papal throne, Philippe le Bel of France discussed with Charles de Valois the question of retaking Constantinople.[62] The following year Clement V exhorted the Venetians to co-operate in the conquest of the Byzantine Empire.[63] Because they had grievances against Andronicus which had already almost brought them to an open rupture,[64] the Venetians readily lent ear to the Pope’s project. A treaty of alliance was concluded between Venice and Charles de Valois, who had the powerful backing of the King of France.[65] In 1307 Clement V wrote to Charles II of Naples urging him to reconquer Constantinople.[66] But the Pope’s interest was soon diverted by the project of a crusade to support Armenia and Cyprus against the Egyptians.[67] Philippe le Bel turned his attention to the spoliation of the Knights Templars and to the important ecclesiastical questions arising out of the movement to rehabilitate the memory of the unfortunate Boniface VIII.
Until the death of Philippe le Bel, in 1314, however, Andronicus and Michael always felt that there might at any moment be a repetition of the Fourth Crusade. In seeking the reasons for the almost unhampered progress of Osman against Nicomedia, Nicaea, and Brusa, it must not be forgotten that the Byzantine emperors did not have even the moral support of Christendom in their losing fight.