To say that Cantacuzenos was the cause of the downfall of the Byzantine Empire would be to ignore other forces working to the same end, and to put too great an emphasis upon the power of an individual human will to shape the destinies of the world. However, in the stage of world history, leaders of men are the personification of causes. We group everything around them. The character and acts of Cantacuzenos reveal the fatal weakness in the Balkan peninsula of his day. The Ottoman conquest was possible because there was no consciousness of religious or racial commonweal. How could this larger devotion, this larger sense of duty and obligation, be expected in men who were not influenced, much less constrained, by ties of blood and personal friendship?
XIII
Cantacuzenos ceased to be a factor in Byzantine affairs in 1355. But the Greeks could not rid themselves as easily of Orkhan. The Osmanlis had come to stay.
It is impossible to establish with any degree of certainty the conquests of Soleiman pasha in the hinterland of the Gulf of Saros and of the Sea of Marmora. But we know that he captured Demotika, and cut off Constantinople from Adrianople by occupying Tchorlu.[235] If these important places were retaken by the Byzantines after the premature death of Soleiman, it was only for a brief time. At the beginning of the reign of Murad the Osmanlis were firmly ensconced along the coasts of Thrace, and had made some permanent progress into the interior.
There was a sudden and full awakening on the part of the Greeks to the knowledge that the Ottoman invasion of 1354 was an irreparable disaster. A year before Soleiman pasha settled his Moslem colonies in the Thracian Chersonese, the inhabitants of Philadelphia had felt themselves so completely abandoned by their emperors that they had appealed directly to the Pope for aid, promising to return to the Roman communion.[236] At the approach of the Osmanlis in Thrace, the country population had fled to Constantinople, abandoning everything. Those who had money to emigrate elsewhere did so immediately. They had no hope of a change in the fortunes of their country.[237]
The annalists of the Byzantine Empire record no heroic, bitter resistance to the army of Soleiman pasha. There was no mayor of the palace, no Joan, to revive the confidence of the people in their rulers, or to replace the family that had proved its unfitness. The Greeks had feared Cantacuzenos, and had attributed their hopeless condition to his alliance with the Osmanlis. But they could not have greater confidence in John Palaeologos. For he made no effort, not even in the smallest way, to demonstrate that he was different from his weak and disloyal forbears.
The Byzantines feared also the intrigues of the Genoese, who were as persistent in their efforts to undermine the integrity of the Byzantine Empire, as are the foreigners to-day engaged in commerce in the Levant to weaken and destroy the authority of the Ottoman Empire.[238] The banishment of Cantacuzenos could not save them from the Osmanlis. Palaeologos could not save them. They could not save themselves. The only way which occurred to them of preventing the Ottoman conquest was to give themselves to some Christian power. There were actually plans on foot to offer the remnant of the empire to Venice, to Hungary, even to Serbia![239]
In France, during the fourteenth century, the Turks were not regarded as a permanent factor in the Near East. Western Asia Minor was not called ‘Turquie’ or ‘Turquemanie’, but ‘the land which the Turks hold’.[240] There was no such illusion among the Italians. They accustomed themselves very rapidly to the idea that the Osmanlis, if not the Turkish tribes, were in Asia Minor and the Aegaean to stay.
The immigration across the Hellespont in 1354 was not looked upon by those who were acquainted with the weakness and impotence of the Byzantines as a raid or as a temporary affair. For several years the Genoese had thought it to their advantage to seek the friendship of Orkhan.[241] In 1355 two far-sighted Venetians wrote the whole truth to the Senate. They did not mince matters. Matteo Venier, baily at Constantinople, warned the Senate in the strongest terms about the menace of Ottoman aggrandizement.[242] Marino Falieri went farther. He pointed out that the Byzantine Empire must inevitably become the booty of the Osmanlis, and urged his countrymen to get ahead of them.[243] Prophetic words and daring suggestion. Had Venice at this time had a Dandolo of the stamp of the intrepid blind Doge who diverted the Fourth Crusade to wreak his vengeance upon his mutilators, Islam might have been kept out of Europe.
When John Palaeologos resumed the throne of his fathers, he found himself as much at the mercy of Orkhan as Cantacuzenos had been. His dependence is revealed in the story of Halil. Halil, son of Orkhan and Theodora, was captured by pirates in 1357, and taken to Phocaea. Orkhan held his brother-in-law responsible for this kidnapping, and called upon him to rescue his nephew. In February 1358, while the Osmanlis under Soleiman pasha were advancing in Thrace, we see John V, at the behest of Orkhan, spending what strength and energy he had in the siege of Phocaea. Later, when he went back to Constantinople, Orkhan peremptorily ordered him to return to direct in person the siege. John started out, and met his fleet, which had become anxious about his absence and had given up the siege. He could not persuade the galleys to turn back with him. So he wrote to Orkhan begging to be excused from continuing an undertaking beyond his power to carry through successfully.