[53] Ducas, i. 6.
[54] Cant. iv. 3.
[55] Vol. vii. p. 30, edition of Dr. J. B. Bury. The Tartars were still in the Balkan peninsula, and Orchan in 1347, probably just after the marriage of John, sent six thousand Turks to aid Matthew, son of Cantacuzenus, in fighting against the kral of Serbia.
[56] Greg. xxvii. 49.
[57] Cant. iv. 5 and 6.
[58] ἕνεκα ἀσφαλείας πράττειν, iv. 3.
[59] Even Gibbon (vii. 30) says, ‘It was in the last quarrel with his pupil that Cantacuzenus inflicted the deep and deadly wound which could never be healed by his successors and which is poorly expiated by his theological dialogue against the prophet Mahomet.’ But the Moslems, both from the north and south, had been fighting in Europe fifty years earlier, sometimes on the side of the Greeks, oftener, as with the Catalans, against them.
[60] Heyd’s History of Commerce in the Levant.
[61] The Black Death (πανούκλα) was the terrible disease which spread throughout Europe and depopulated most of its large cities between 1346 and 1370. Cantacuzenus, whose son Andronicus fell a victim, gives a vivid and terrible picture of its symptoms, and of its effect upon the population (iv. 8). Dr. Mordtmann, who is not merely distinguished as an archæologist well acquainted with the Byzantine writers, but as a physician of great experience, believes it to have been a black form of smallpox, and not what is usually known as plague, and a well-known specialist in plague, to whose attention I have submitted the account of Cantacuzenus, is disposed to accept the same view.
[62] The walls of Galata, both before and after this enlargement, which doubled the area of the city, may still be traced.