Meanwhile Castile had attempted to solve the great problem of the age. By the treaty of 1479, when Isabella was recognised and the claims of Joanna were abandoned by her uncle and husband, Alfonso V., Portugal had given up the Canaries, but had received the confirmation of past and future discoveries on the African coast. Thus Spain was debarred from competing with Portugal on the route to India which Henry the Navigator had pointed out. But Christopher Columbus, a Genoese mariner who entered |Discovery of America.| the service of Castile, proposed to find a way to Asia by sailing westwards. In 1492 the first of his ever-famous voyages brought him to land which he conceived to be part of India. He had really found the new world of America, but his fruitful error has given to the islands at which he first touched the name of the West Indies.
These two discoveries, of America and of the route to India round the Cape, are perhaps the greatest events of the fifteenth century. They brought men face to face with new problems, new conceptions, new interests, |Partition of the New World.| which have drawn a conspicuous line of demarcation between the Middle Ages and later times. But these belong to a subsequent period. The most immediate result was to create a danger of collision between Spain and Portugal, which contemporary statesmanship set itself to avert. A bull of Alexander VI. in 1493 drew an imaginary line a hundred leagues west of the Azores, and gave the countries to the west of the line to Spain and those to the east to Portugal. This arrangement was modified in the next year by the treaty of Tordesillas between the two countries, which shifted the line of demarcation some hundred and seventy leagues farther west. This served to give to Portugal its subsequent claim to Brazil. But the monstrous pretension of the two pioneers of discovery to monopolise all its fruits to themselves provoked before long the vigorous resistance of northern countries which were equally fitted by geography for oceanic trade. When Spain in 1580 annexed Portugal, the struggle against a single monopoly became more desperate; and it was this, even more than differences of religion, which led to those prolonged wars with the English and Dutch in which the power of Spain was shattered.
CHAPTER XXI
THE GREEK EMPIRE AND THE OTTOMAN TURKS
The Greek Empire after the recovery of Constantinople in 1261—The reigns of Michael VIII. and Andronicus II.—The Grand Company of the Catalans—Civil war and deposition of Andronicus II.—The Seljuk and Ottoman Turks—Conquests of Othman and Orchan—The tribute of children—John V. and John Cantacuzenos—Stephen Dushan and the Empire of Servia—First conquests of the Turks in Europe—Vassalage of the Greek Empire—Turkish successes against the Slavonic States—Bajazet I. attacks Constantinople—Battle of Angora—Revival of the Ottoman power—The Emperor John VI. and the Council of Florence—Wars of Amurath II. with Hungary—Revolt of Albania under Scanderbeg—Mohammed II. takes Constantinople—Conquest of Servia, Wallachia, and Bosnia—Conquest of Greece—War with Venice—The Turks in Otranto—Death of Mohammed the Conqueror.
It is not a little curious that the two powers which claimed to represent the ancient Empire of Rome both perished in the thirteenth century. The fall of the Hohenstaufen |The Greek Empire after 1261.| and the Great Interregnum mark the real end of the western Empire. Henceforth it is nothing more than a feeble kingship of Germany with a shadowy claim to suzerainty over Italy. The eastern Empire was annihilated by the destructive triumph of the Crusaders in 1204. Its so-called revival in 1261 was merely the recovery of Constantinople by a prince who had previously ruled in Nicæa. The rule of Michael Palæologus and his successors, though the forms of ceremonies of Roman tradition were carefully maintained, has no claim to be called a Roman Empire at all; at the most, it is a Greek or Byzantine Empire. Their territories were smaller than those of several of the western kings. In Europe they held little more than Constantinople itself, with the adjacent district of Roumelia and the peninsula of Chalcidice. To the north and west they were hemmed in by the independent kingdoms of Bulgaria and Servia. The greater part of the Morea was split up into small states in the hands either of Frankish princes or of Venice. Venice also held the important islands of Corfu, Crete, and Negropont, and many of the lesser islands in the Ægean were ruled by Venetian families. In Asia Minor the Palæologi succeeded in retaining for a time the greater part of the west coast with a few towns on the Black Sea; but the rest of the peninsula was in the hands of the Turkish sultans of Iconium, with the exception of a small strip in the south-eastern corner of the Black Sea, which constituted the so-called Empire of Trebizond. It is true that Michael VIII. himself, and even some of his feeble successors, made a few acquisitions of territory, especially in the Morea, but these were counterbalanced by quite equal losses. The Knights of St. John, who lived in Crete for a few years after their expulsion from Acre in 1291, seized Rhodes and the small adjacent islands in 1310. And the Genoese, who had rendered valuable service in the war with the Latin emperors, demanded very large concessions as their reward. Not only did they receive the suburb of Pera or Galata, which they fortified against the Greek emperors, but they established their power at Kaffa in the Crimea, and in Azof, at the mouth of the Don, thus securing a monopoly of the Black Sea trade, and they also seized upon the islands of Lesbos and Chios.
It is a sorry task to trace the fortunes of the decadent Greek Empire during the two centuries that were secured to it, not by any ability on the part of its rulers or any heroism on the part of their subjects, but partly by a series of accidents which checked the advance of encroaching neighbours, and partly by the extraordinary defensive strength of the capital. There is hardly a single episode in this period of Greek history that inspires any interest or would deserve any attention, but that the weakness of the Empire was a prominent cause of that rapid rise of the Ottoman Turks which is one of the great events in history. In Constantinople itself there is little to record except miserable court jealousies and intrigues, and the most puerile discussions of minute questions of religious dogma. The recent establishment of Latin rule had inspired the Greeks with a bitter hatred of Roman Catholicism, and at the same time with a consciousness of their own weakness. Hence the stolid conservatism which characterised the administration in both Church and State under the Palæologi. ‘The Greeks gloried in the name of Romans; they clung to the forms of the imperial government without its military power; they retained the Roman code without the systematic administration of justice, and prided themselves on the orthodoxy of a Church in which the clergy were deprived of all ecclesiastical independence, and lived in a state of vassalage to the imperial Court. Such a society could only wither, though it might wither slowly’ (Finlay).
The fall of the Latin Empire could not take place without causing a sensation in western Europe, and for some time Michael VIII. had to fear a possible attempt to effect its restoration. Charles of Anjou, who as |Michael VIII. and Andronicus II.| the champion of the Papacy has gained Naples and Sicily from the Hohenstaufen, twice pledged himself to carry his victorious forces across the Adriatic, in 1266 by the treaty of Viterbo with the exiled Baldwin II., and in 1281 by the treaty of Orvieto with Venice and Pope Martin IV. So alarmed was Michael VIII., that he resorted to the last expedient of a Greek emperor in distress, and sought to conciliate the Pope by offering to bring about the union of the Greek with the Latin Church. But his pusillanimity made him unpopular with his subjects, and proved to be wholly unnecessary. Both schemes of the Neapolitan king were rendered abortive; the former by the attack of the luckless Conradin in 1267, the latter by the Sicilian Vespers in 1282 (see p. [25]). These events enabled Michael, who died in the latter year, to leave an undiminished dominion to his son, Andronicus II. The new emperor was as superstitious and as timidly orthodox as any of his bishops could desire, and his personal character was far better than that of the majority of Eastern despots; but he was a thoroughly worthless and incompetent ruler. His long reign, which lasted from 1282 to 1328, was marked by three events which brought the Empire to the verge of ruin. Ruling over a comparatively small and unwarlike population, the Greek emperors after 1261 were peculiarly dependent upon mercenary troops for either defensive or aggressive warfare. In 1303 chance gave to Andronicus the service of perhaps the finest fighting force in Europe at that time. The twenty years’ struggle for the possession of Sicily between the houses of Anjou and Aragon had just ended in the victory of the latter, and Frederick I. of Sicily was not unwilling to rid himself of the hardy soldiers from Catalonia and the other Aragonese provinces who had gained him his crown, but were likely to be a source of trouble and disorder now that peace had been concluded. Under the leadership of a brilliant adventurer, Roger de Flor, these men were formed |The Grand Company.| into the ‘Grand Company of the Catalans,’ and were transported to the eastern Empire. Properly led, these troops might have taken advantage of the dismemberment of the Seljuk dominions to gain the whole of Asia Minor for the Palæologi. But Andronicus II. was incapable of even planning so ambitious a project. The strength of the Company was wasted in petty operations; and when the withholding of arrears of pay provoked a mutiny, the emperor recklessly endeavoured to intimidate the mercenaries by procuring the assassination of their idolised commander. Vowing vengeance, the Catalans turned their arms against their employer, routed the armies that were sent against them, and for the next few years lived in luxurious idleness upon the spoils which they wrested from the emperor’s unfortunate subjects. Nor was it possible to expel them, and they only quitted the dominions of Andronicus when they were tempted in 1310 to enter the service of the duke of Athens. The emperor’s last years were darkened by a civil war which was almost as disastrous as his quarrel with the foreign mercenaries. His grandson, another Andronicus, a |Civil war, 1321-1328.| young man of considerable ability but of vicious habits, raised the standard of rebellion in 1321 because he was not admitted to the position of joint-emperor which had been held by his father till his death in the previous year. The war was interrupted by several futile attempts to bring about a reconciliation; but at last the partisans of the young prince, among whom John Cantacuzenos was the most prominent, gained a complete victory in 1328, when the capital was taken and Andronicus II. was deposed in favour of his grandson. Four years later the aged emperor died, after having been compelled to become a monk in order to render his restoration impossible. The terrible waste of force in the ravages of the Grand Company and the miserable contest between grandfather and grandson are the more significant when it is remembered that in this reign occurred the first collision between the Greek Empire and its destined destroyers, the Ottoman Turks.
The Ottoman Turks, or Osmanlis, as they call themselves, were by no means the only or the earliest members of the |The Ottoman Turks.| Turkish race to gain distinction. Long before their appearance in history the Seljuk Turks had risen to ascendency in western Asia, first as the soldiers and then as the masters of the Saracen caliphs. A Seljuk dynasty established itself in the eleventh century in Nicæa with the title of Sultans of Rome, as ruling over great part of the Roman Empire. The early crusades had aided the Eastern emperors to drive the Turks back from Nicæa to Iconium, but they remained the dominant power in Asia Minor. The disruption of the eastern Empire after the Fourth Crusade would probably have enabled the Seljuks to extend their dominions if they had not been at the same time exposed to attacks from the Moguls in the east. It was in this war that we first hear of the Ottoman Turks. One of the sultans of Iconium was hard pressed in battle by the Moguls, when the scale was turned by the intervention of a small but warlike band of Turks under Ertogrul, the father of Othman, from whom their later name was derived. The grateful sultan rewarded his unexpected auxiliaries with a considerable grant of lands; and when the Seljuk power was broken up on the death of Aladdin III. in 1307, Othman was one of the numerous emirs who acquired independence. Among these emirs Othman and his successors gradually rose to acknowledged pre-eminence, chiefly through their victories at the expense of the Greek emperors, which attracted to their service the ablest and most ambitious Turks from |Conquests of Othman and Orchan.| the other provinces. Just before Othman’s death in 1326 his forces captured the Greek city of Brusa, which became the Asiatic capital of the Ottomans. Under his son and successor, Orchan, the Turkish power made immense strides. Orchan’s first enterprise was the attack on Nicæa, which may be regarded as the second capital of the Byzantine Empire. No formal siege was laid to the city, but the Turks constructed strong forts in the neighbourhood, from which they could harass the inhabitants and cut off supplies of water and food. Andronicus III. and his minister, John Cantacuzenos, crossed the Bosphorus to attempt the relief of Nicæa, but were defeated at Pelekanon (1329), the first battle in which a Greek emperor confronted the Ottoman Turks in arms. Nicæa surrendered in 1330, and was treated with such leniency as to create a temporary impression that the Greeks would be better off under Turkish than under Byzantine rule. The military incapacity of the emperor allowed Orchan to continue his aggressions with comparative ease; and at the end of the next ten years the only territories retained by Andronicus in Asia Minor were the two towns of Phocæa and Philadelphia, together with a small strip of territory along the eastern coast of the Bosphorus.
Orchan is famous in Turkish history not only as a conqueror, but also as a legislator and administrator. One of his institutions proved invaluable to his successors. The law of Mohammed offered two alternatives to unbelievers—the Koran or tribute. By payment of tribute the conquered could purchase the security of life and property and the permission to retain their own religious worship. |The tribute children.| Orchan introduced the innovation of exacting this tribute not only in money or goods, but in children. Every Christian village was compelled to furnish every year a fixed proportion of the strongest and most promising boys about eight years of age. These children were brought up in the Mohammedan religion, and were educated with the greatest care both for body and mind. As they grew older, according as they excelled in mental or physical qualities, they were drafted either into the civil administration or into the army. The civil servants taken from these children formed an administrative body, which was under the absolute control of the sultan, and was more efficient than could be found in any other country at that time. The troops were still more serviceable. They constituted the famous Janissaries (Yeni Tcheri or new troops), who for two centuries were unsurpassed by any other military force. With diabolical ingenuity the Turks secured the victory of the Crescent by the children of the Cross, and trained up Christian boys to destroy the independence and authority of their country and their Church.
A critical period in Byzantine history followed the death of Andronicus III. in 1341. His young son, John V., was left |John V. and John Cantacuzenos.| under the regency of his mother, Anne of Savoy. But the authority of the regent was disputed by John Cantacuzenos, who had been virtual prime minister under Andronicus, and was now persuaded by his partisans to assume the imperial title. A prolonged strife of factions followed, in which both sides were base enough to appeal for the support of the Turks. Cantacuzenos was successful in gaining Orchan to his side, but by a bargain which even Greek morality considered disgraceful. His daughter was married to the Mussulman sultan, and was sent to reside in the harem at Brusa. But the complaisant father achieved his object. In 1347 he was recognised as emperor by the empress-regent, and was to be allowed to hold the executive authority for ten years, when it was to be shared with John V., who was to marry Helena, another daughter of Cantacuzenos. The latter was now crowned again with his wife, and John V. was also crowned with his bride. Thus Constantinople witnessed the unique pageant of two emperors and three empresses at the same time.