Stephen, Kral of Serbia, now turned a deaf ear to the old emperor’s reiterated appeals for further aid. In his desperation, old Andronicus called in the Bulgarians, to whom he would have betrayed Constantinople, had not young Andronicus appeared in time to anticipate this culminating infamy of the older Palaeologos. A Venetian fleet, which was besieging the city, retired, because its commander did not want to appear to take sides either for or against the younger emperor. Friends inside left a gate open. Young Andronicus entered and appeared suddenly at the palace. The Patriarch was re-established. Old Andronicus was deposed and imprisoned.[102]
The old man, after having become, as Gregoras charitably puts it, ‘blind through tears’,[103] retired to a monastery, and died there in great poverty.[104] Like many others of the Palaeologi, Andronicus II had no redeeming trait of character, no single good deed to his credit. Stranger to every natural affection, he died as he had lived, hating his own flesh and blood, striving to ruin his country, mocking God by the very monk’s garb that he wore.
The first care of young Andronicus, after ridding himself of his grandfather and rival, was to march on Adrianople, where, according to Cantacuzenos, he forced Michael Asan of Bulgaria to make peace by the display of his ‘fine army’.[105] Either the Bulgarians were very weak at this time, or the ‘fine army’ of Andronicus III melted away quickly. For in the spring of the following year, 1329, Andronicus had to ‘gather hastily’[106] an army, when for the first time he felt it his duty to go to the aid of beleaguered Nicaea. He crossed the Bosphorus, and joined the battle with the Osmanlis at Pelecanon, now Maltepé, on the north shore of the gulf of Nicomedia, a few miles from Chalcedon, the modern Haïdar Pasha.
The battle of Pelecanon is passed over in silence by the Ottoman historians as too insignificant to mention. But it is of the utmost importance in showing why the Nicaeans surrendered their city to Orkhan. Cantacuzenos, who took part in this battle, gives a long story in which the result of the battle he is compelled to record belies all that goes before it. The Byzantines, according to Cantacuzenos, were eminently successful in repelling the attacks of the Osmanlis. On all sides the Greeks won, and killed hundreds of their opponents, while their own losses were slight. After inflicting this defeat upon Orkhan, Andronicus proposed, at nightfall, that the army withdraw to Constantinople! Some of his ardent warriors continued, however, to engage the enemy. Andronicus, surprised with only a few followers around him, was wounded, and escaped capture only by a hasty retreat. He was carried in a litter to Scutari, where he did not wait for news of his army. A caïque conveyed him safely home. Thus the successors of the Caesars abandoned Asia for ever.
Old Andronicus, in his hour of humiliation, did not hesitate to strike one more blow against his country. Spies of his in the army spread the rumour that the young emperor was dead. The imperial troops fled. They abandoned all their baggage, and were massacred by the Osmanlis, who hunted them down in the hills from which the fugitives could see the dome of St. Sophia.[107]
When we contrast the long story of the civil war between Andronicus and his grandfather, the armies gathered, the money expended, the energy displayed with this one pitiful attempt to aid the three great cities of Bithynia, there is no need for further speculation as to why these cities fell into the hands of the Osmanlis. No wearers of the imperial purple had ever made a more dismal showing: old Andronicus plotting to demoralize the army of his country by false rumours, and young Andronicus making such rumours possible by being the first to flee from the field after receiving a slight wound. It is no wonder that Cantacuzenos records that after this battle Nicaea fell into the hands of the Osmanlis.[108] It is altogether natural, too, that the inhabitants of Nicaea should refuse, as those of Brusa had done, to profit by the terms of the capitulation, and leave for Constantinople.[109] Their trades, silk-weaving and pottery, were dependent upon local materials, which they could not get elsewhere. There had been nothing to inspire in them that devotion to a faith which made the Huguenots long afterwards leave all without hesitation after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes.
Hadji Khalfa says that in the seventeenth century the walls of Nicaea were entirely ruined.[110] The condition of these walls to-day (for they have not been repaired in modern times) contradicts this statement. It has been the claim of the Osmanlis that Nicaea was reduced by fighting. If this were true the walls must have suffered. It is also the common belief[111] that Nicaea, at the time of the Ottoman conquest, and for some time after, was a prosperous city.[112] But Ibn Batutah, who visited Nicaea within five or six years after its change of ownership, wrote that its walls were intact, that the sole entrance to the city was by a road built up like a bridge and so narrow that horsemen could not pass on it, and that the walls were surrounded by a wide deep moat filled with water. One had to reach the gate by a pont-levis, which was in working order and used at the time of his visit. The city itself was in ruins and occupied only by a small number of men in the service of Orkhan. He was told that Orkhan had besieged the city ten years, and Osman before him twenty years. As the famous traveller was an honoured guest in the palace of Orkhan, where Orkhan’s wife was living at the time, and where the emir himself came for a few days during the forty days which Ibn Batutah spent in Nicaea, his testimony is certainly worthy of credence.[113]
That Nicaea, while preserving its admirable fortifications, should have decreased so rapidly in importance and population during the seventy years between the return of the Byzantine emperors to Constantinople and the Ottoman occupation, is explainable only by three suppositions: that a majority of the inhabitants had died off, that they had emigrated, or that they had gradually joined their fortunes with the people of Osman. We find in Byzantine annals no record of a disastrous plague or of a large emigration of potters and porcelain workers and weavers to the capital or elsewhere from Nicaea. There was little fighting. The Osmanlis had not yet learned to massacre. What are we to believe, then, concerning the large population of this so recently flourishing city?
It is hardly a conjecture to affirm that the Nicaeans must have cast their fortunes with that steadily growing band whose firm conviction, forced upon them against their will and in violence to centuries-old traditions and sentiments, was that the old structure of society could not be repaired, and that there must be an entirely new building upon the old foundation. This conviction did not come suddenly or to all at once. It was a gradual dawning and awakening which caused the ranks of the Osmanlis to become greater every year. Before the end of Orkhan’s reign the nucleus of Asiatic adventurers which had gathered around Osman in the little village of Sugut had grown to half a million. It could not have been by natural increase. It could not have been by the flocking in of nomads from the East. Orkhan was cut off from contact with the Asiatic hinterland. His rivals of Karaman, Satalia, Aïdin, and Sarukhan would have attracted adventurers from the outside before himself. Orkhan formed his nation out of the elements on the ground. These were mostly Greek. Nicaea is but an illustration of the way in which the new race was born and the new nation formed.
This conviction that no good could come from Constantinople went farther than a transference of allegiance from the Palaeologi to the family of Osman. Mohammed was substituted for Christ. What a momentous significance there is in the records of the Greek Orthodox Church that in 1339 and again in 1340 the Patriarch sent an impassioned appeal to the Nicaeans that they should not abjure the Christian faith![114] At that very moment when the ecclesiastics of Constantinople were espousing the rival claims of unworthy aspirants to the imperial purple and were anathematizing each other in supporting trivial theological arguments, Christians were adopting the new Credo: ‘I believe in one God, and Mohammed is his prophet!’ in the city of the Nicene Creed.