The second cause which had contributed to the diminution of the empire and of its population was the system of Turkish conquests. Large numbers of the Christian population were killed; larger numbers were driven away to wander houseless and homeless and either to die of starvation or find their way into the towns.
Conquest of a territory or capture of a city, forcible expulsion of the inhabitants or massacre of most of them and occupation of the captured places followed each other with wearisome regularity. The military occupation was that of nomads who replaced agriculturists. Everywhere the cattle of the Christians were raided. Arable lands became the wasteful sheep-walks of nomad Turks.[169]
Black Death.
Lastly, the depopulation caused by the terrible diseases which visited Europe in the century preceding the Moslem conquest aided greatly in destroying the empire. The prevalence of Black Death or Plague killed in the Balkan peninsula and especially in the towns hundreds of thousands and possibly millions of the population. In 1347 this scourge, probably the most deadly form of epidemic that has ever afflicted humanity, made its appearance in Eastern Europe. The cities of the empire contained large populations crowded together, and their normal population was increased by many fugitives. These crowded cities, with their defective sanitary arrangements and poverty-stricken inhabitants, offered a favourable soil for a rich harvest of death. The disease had followed the coasts from the Black Sea, where, says Cantacuzenus, it had carried off nearly all the inhabitants. At Constantinople it raged during two years, one of its first victims being the eldest son of Cantacuzenus himself.[170] Rich as well as poor succumbed to it. What proportion of the inhabitants of the city died it is impossible to say, but, judging by what is known of its effect elsewhere, we should probably not be wrong in suggesting that half the people perished. But its ravages were not confined to the towns, and from one end of the Balkan peninsula to the other it swept the country in repeated visitations and probably carried off nearly the same proportion of inhabitants.[171] Cantacuzenus, in a vivid description of the disease, adds that the saddest feature about it was the feeling of hopelessness and despair which it left behind.
The first visitation of the disease continued during two years in the capital. In 1348 it spread throughout the empire. We have seen that in 1352 the victorious Venetian and Spanish fleets dared not venture to attack Galata for fear that their crews would be attacked by the malady. It raged in Asia Minor as fiercely as in Europe. Trebizond was ruined. The Turks themselves suffered severely. Between its entrance into Europe and 1364 the Morea had three visitations, and what remained of the Greek population became panic-stricken. Further north, at Yanina its ravages were equally terrible. In 1368 so many men died that Thomas, governor of the city, forced their widows to marry Serbians whom he had induced or compelled to enter the city for that purpose. A further outbreak seven years later took place in the same city, and among its victims was Thomas’s own daughter. During the same period Arta, which adjoins the ancient Cyzicus, suffered severely. It is useless for our purpose to inquire whether Black Death and Plague were identical, but one or the other continued to depopulate town and country. We have seen it at Ferrara in 1438, but in the interval since it first made its appearance it had visited the capital on seven different occasions, the latest being in 1431 when the whole country from Constantinople to Cape Matapan suffered severely.[172]
It may safely be assumed that the Turks, who lived in the open air, and in the country rather than in towns, suffered less than the Christians. Though they are reported to have lost severely, the process of depopulation scarcely told against them. The places of those who died were taken by the ever-crowding press of immigrants flocking westward. The successors of the Greeks who perished were not Christians but Turks. In other words, while the Christians died out of the land, there were always at hand Turkish nomads to take their place.
It is when contemplating the devastation produced by successive attacks of disease, one of which was sufficient to kill half the population of England, when remembering the weakening of the empire by the Latin occupation and the subsequent attempts to recapture the city, and when recognizing that the empire was the bulwark against a great westward movement of the central Asiatic races which forced forward the Turk to find new pastures in Christian lands, that we can understand how the diminution of the Empire and of its population and its ultimate downfall came to be inevitable.
Desolation on accession of last empire and now.
Those who have travelled most in the Balkan peninsula and in Asia Minor recognise most completely how densely populated and flourishing these countries once were, and how completely they have become a desolation. Everywhere the traveller is even now surprised at the sight of deserted and fertile plains and of ruined cities, of some of which the very names have been forgotten. From Baalbek to Nicomedia the ancient roads pass through or near places whose names recall populous and civilised towns which are but the ghastly shadows of their former prosperity. Ephesus, which when visited by Sir John Maundeville in 1322, after it had been captured by the Turks, was still ‘a fair city,’ is now absolutely deserted. Nicaea, the city which has given its name to the Creed of Christendom, was also at the time of the Turkish occupation populous and flourishing. It now contains a hundred miserable houses within its still standing walls. Hierapolis and Laodicea are heaps of uninhabited ruins. A scholarly English traveller remarks that his search has been in vain for the sites of many cities once well known, and that he met ruins of many cities which he was unable to identify.[173] The same story of depopulation and of destruction was and is told by the condition of the Balkan peninsula. The observant traveller La Brocquière, who made his journey through Asia Minor to Constantinople and thence to Budapest, noted that desolation was everywhere. In the district between the capital and Adrianople he adds that ‘the country is completely ruined, has but poor villages, and, though good and well watered, is thinly peopled.’ He found Chorlou ‘destroyed by the Turks.’ He visited Trajanopolis and describes it as once ‘very large, but now nothing is seen but ruins with a few inhabitants.’ He found Vyra, to whose church three hundred canons had been formerly attached, a poor place with the choir of the church only remaining and used as a Turkish mosque.[174] All contemporaries bear witness to the depopulation and ruin of the country. From pestilence and the results of the Latin conquest it might have recovered, but when to these disasters was added that of conquest by successive hordes of barbarians whose work was always destructive, its ruin was complete.