But Orchan and John, though nominally on friendly terms, distrusted each other, and indeed Orchan’s character and conduct compare favourably with John’s. When Halil, the son of Orchan and of John’s sister-in-law Theodora, was captured by pirates from Phocaea, at the head of the Gulf of Smyrna, and then in the occupation of the Genoese, it was with difficulty that John could be induced to join in the siege of that city in order to release his nephew. He endeavoured to make a bargain with Orchan before he consented to co-operate. Finally Halil was ransomed, Orchan and John each paying half of the amount. On his release the two rulers met, and at Chalcedon, the present Kadikeuy, John promised his infant daughter to Halil, and the two rulers swore to establish a perpetual peace.
In 1359 Orchan died. During the thirty-two years of his reign, he had planted the Ottoman state firmly in Asia Minor. The landmarks of its progress were the important cities of Nicaea, Ismidt, and Angora, each of which dominated a large tract of country. He had compacted the Turks together, had attracted to his rule many of those who had previously acknowledged other emirs, and every year of his reign had seen the number of Ottoman Turks increasing by defections from his rivals and by immigrants from the eastward. He was an able commander and an exceptionally good administrator. While Othman is the founder of the Turkish dynasty, Orchan is the sovereign who caused his people to be recognised as forming a separate nationality, and was thus the maker of the Turkish nation.
Sultan Murad the First, 1359–1389.
Orchan was succeeded by his son Amurath or, adopting the modern orthography, Murad. He was the younger brother of Suliman, who died two months before his father. The new sultan was not influenced by any tie of relationship with the imperial family. Moreover, the influence of Islam was now becoming much more serious than it had hitherto been. Mahometanism had become the religion of most of the Turks, and Murad, stimulated by a certain mufti, soon learned to become a fanatical persecutor of even his own Christian subjects. He increased the amount of taxes which they had to pay, and generally made their burdens heavy. But by far the heaviest of those burdens was caused by the organisation of the body of ‘New Troops’ established by Orchan and known as Janissaries. He decreed a law, said to be founded upon the sacred text of the Koran, that the Christians should be required to give to himself absolutely one in five of their children. From the boys thus obtained, he established the famous corps whose deeds were to make them for ever famous.[89]
At the commencement of his reign, Murad turned to conquest. The work of Orchan had been to establish and compact Ottoman rule in Asia Minor. That of his successor was mainly to carry out a similar policy in Europe. After capturing Heraclia on the Black Sea, he crossed over into Thrace and occupied Adrianople, seized Didymotica and Chorlou, overran the whole country between Constantinople and Bulgaria, and sent his ships to plunder the Greek islands. In return for the fanaticism with which they had inspired him, he promised that one fifth of the spoil captured by land and sea should be given to the mollahs. When the sale of Christian captives took place, he took care, says Ducas,[90] that the young, the well set-up, and the strong men should be bought at a low price to be added to the Janissaries.
The few remaining Turkish emirs in Asia Minor whose territories had not been gained by the Ottomans joined forces to resist the new sultan. At the same time the Serbians, Bulgarians, and Hungarians, all of whom had become alarmed at Murad’s progress, declared war upon him. Compelled in 1363 to defend himself against the emirs to the east and south of his territories in Asia Minor, he was sufficiently strong to force the emperor to bind himself not merely to give aid to him in Asia but not to attempt to recover any of the cities or territories which he had conquered in Europe. When he had broken the strength of the rebel emirs he crossed rapidly back into Thrace and near Adrianople defeated a combined army of Hungarians, Serbians, and Bulgarians. Two years afterwards, in 1366, an army of fifty thousand Serbians endeavoured in vain to drive Murad out of Adrianople. The lowest degradation which the empire had yet reached was when the miserable John consented to become the tributary of Murad in order that he might enjoy his remaining possessions in Europe. In 1373 he formally recognised the sultan as his suzerain, bound himself to render him military service and to give his son Manuel as a hostage.[91]
The only palliative which can be offered for John’s conduct is that he felt resistance to be useless. The empire wanted peace. The cities and towns had been devastated, not merely by successive wars, civil and foreign, but by the terrible Black Death, a plague which since 1346 had demanded everywhere its large quota of victims. He had seen Turkish armies defeated, but everywhere and always reappearing in greater numbers than ever. Asiatics were in overwhelming numbers on every side. The Egyptian Moslems had captured Sis, the capital of the Lesser Armenia, in 1369. Not only was every district in Asia Minor overrun with Turks, but they had penetrated Europe at many points. Bands of them had been left in the country when the armies, invited into Macedonia or Thrace or crossing over for plunder, had withdrawn. ‘For my part, I believe,’ says Ducas, ‘that there is a greater multitude of them between the Dardanelles and the Danube than in Asia Minor,’ and although Ducas wrote three quarters of a century later, his remarks are applicable to the reign of John. He describes how Turks from Cappadocia, Lycia, Cilicia, and Caria had sailed into Europe to pillage and to ruin the lands of the Christians. A hundred thousand had laid waste the country as far west as Dalmatia. The Albanians from being a large nation had become a small one. The Wallachs, the Serbians, and his own people, the Romans, had been completely ruined. Amid his lamentations over the evils inflicted by the invaders, his saddest thought and gravest source of complaint is that the victories gained by the Turks had been won by men who were the offspring of Christian parents, by Janissaries who were of Roman, Bulgarian, Serbian, Wallachian, or Hungarian origin. It is in the hopelessness of further resistance to such overwhelming forces that the only explanation of John’s acceptance of the position of a tributary prince is to be found.
The ruin of the South Serbians and Eastern Bulgarians of which Ducas speaks had really taken place. They had each ventured to declare themselves empires. With the indifference which characterises the Greek writers in regard to the conduct of other nations, they allude to rather than Battle of Harmanli, 1371.mention how that ruin had been brought about. In 1371, a great battle took place on the plains of the river Maritza which sealed the fate of the Eastern Bulgarians and of the Serbians who were in Macedonia. The three sons of the kral took advantage of the absence of Murad in Asia and, having collected an army of sixty thousand men, marched almost as far as Adrianople without opposition. While they were feasting in front of a bridge over the Maritza near Harmanli, fully assured of their safety by reason of their superiority in numbers, suddenly a night attack was made upon them by a small division of the Turkish army. It was soon joined by the entire army of seventy thousand Turks. Wild confusion was followed by a terrible slaughter. One of the three sons of the kral was killed and the other two were drowned in the Maritza. Hundreds of soldiers perished in attempting to cross it. The army was simply annihilated.[92]
To assist him in his conquest of Hungary, Serbia, Bulgaria, and Moldavia, Murad allied himself, in 1373, with the Tartars north of the Danube, and both prepared to attack these states.
Meanwhile in the troubles which arose in 1374 between John and his son Manuel on the one side and Andronicus the grandson of John by his eldest son of the same name, Murad exercised his right as suzerain. Shortly after Manuel was associated with his father, the two were ordered to accompany their lord on an expedition. It was during their absence that the eldest sons of the emperor and sultan, as already mentioned, either swore friendship and common action, when each succeeded to his father’s throne, or were considered by their fathers to have done so. It may have been believed that they had entered into a conspiracy to hasten such succession. Countouz, the obnoxious son of Murad, raised a rebellion against his father when he heard of his cruel resolve, but his troops passed over to the side of their sultan. He fled to Didymotica and joined Andronicus, who was also a fugitive from his father. Murad followed his son, and laid siege to that city. The inhabitants, pressed by famine, opened the gates to him. Countouz was blinded by his father, but Andronicus escaped; all the garrison was drowned and a large number of the inhabitants had their throats cut, Murad adding to his barbarity by compelling the fathers to be the executioners of their sons.[93]