During this time the Turks were making steady and almost unchecked progress in Greece, on the eastern shore of the Aegean, and in Bulgaria and Macedonia. The inhabitants were becoming weary of the constant struggle and it is significant that in 1385 the patriarch Nilos wrote to pope Urban the Sixth that the Turks left complete liberty to the Church. Even Rome appears to have been in despair. Urban the Sixth like his predecessors had so completely made his action against the Turks conditional upon the renunciation by the Greeks of their heresies and upon Union with Rome that all hope of aid from him or from Western Europe had for a time died out.[83]
The last years of the reign of John Palaeologus were once more disturbed by domestic troubles. His eldest son, Andronicus, had died in 1385, but his grandson, John, had many friends and was supported by the Genoese. His party was sufficiently powerful to gain an entry into the city by the Chariseus or Adrianople Gate and to compel the old Emperor John to associate his grandson of the same name as emperor with Manuel, his younger son, and himself. After a few months, however, Manuel, who had never accepted the arrangement, entered by the Golden Gate and Death of John.his nephew fled. In 1391, the elder Emperor John died after a reign of fifty-one years.
During his long occupancy of the throne the power of the Turks had enormously increased and the empire had almost become a vassal of Murad. In the last year of his reign there occurred an incident, already alluded to, which illustrates at once the weakness of John and his practical vassalage to the Turks. Wishing to strengthen the landward walls and especially at and near the Golden Gate, where the defences had fallen into decay, he gave out that he was about to clear the city of its accumulated rubbish and to ornament that gate. Bajazed, who was now the Ottoman sultan and successor of his father, Murad, when he learned what had been done, insisted that the new defensive works should be destroyed, threatening that if his wishes were not complied with he would put out the eyes of John’s son Manuel, who had gone by the Sultan’s orders to accompany the Turkish army on a campaign in Pamphylia. John obeyed the orders he had received.[84]
CHAPTER V
REIGN OF ORCHAN: STRUGGLES WITH EMPIRE; ITS SUCCESSES AND REVERSES; INVASIONS OF TARTARS. REIGN OF MURAD: DEFEAT OF SERBIANS AND BULGARIANS BY TURKS; BATTLE OF COSSOVO-POL AND ASSASSINATION OF MURAD.
The death of John, in 1391, is a convenient period to resume the narrative of the progress of the Turks.
Othman had died the year after the capture of Brousa, in 1326. He had succeeded in making his division of the Turks the most formidable in Asia Minor, in conquering or absorbing the Seljukian Turks, in destroying many flourishing cities and strongholds on the Black Sea, in entirely preventing the reorganisation of the power of the empire in the north-west portion of Asia Minor, and, above all, in organising a fighting race into a formidable army.
Reign of Sultan Orchan, 1326–1357.