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The Cambridge Medieval History - Book XVI: The Decline and Fall of the Eastern Roman Empire
The Cambridge Medieval History - Book XVI: The Decline and Fall of the Eastern Roman Empire
The Cambridge Medieval History - Book XVI: The Decline and Fall of the Eastern Roman Empire
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The Cambridge Medieval History - Book XVI: The Decline and Fall of the Eastern Roman Empire

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 For over a thousand years, from the end of the fourth century to the middle of the fifteenth, the Byzantine Empire was the centre of a civilization equal to that of any age in brilliancy, certainly the most brilliant known to the Middle Ages, and possibly even the only real civilization which prevailed in Europe between the close of the fifth century and the beginning of the eleventh. While the barbarian states of the West were laboriously developing the elements of a new culture from the scanty remains of the Roman tradition, Byzantium—Rome’s successor, and imbued with the spirit and teachings of Hellenism—never ceased to be the centre of refinement and the home of a great movement in thought and art. Byzantium, indeed, was no mere transmitter of the tradition of antiquity. Contact with the East had modified her, and the influence of Christianity had left a deep imprint; and, contrary to a still widely-spread opinion, she was capable of originality and creation. Hellenism, Christianity, and the East met and combined in forming Byzantine civilization; and by the characteristic forms it assumed, by its superiority, as well as by the long and profound influence it exercised in both the Eastern and Western world, this civilization played a prominent part in the history of the Middle Ages, the history of thought, and the history of mankind...
LanguageEnglish
Release dateMar 4, 2016
ISBN9781531249809
The Cambridge Medieval History - Book XVI: The Decline and Fall of the Eastern Roman Empire
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William Miller

William (Skip) Miller learned the hard way that being unprepared for cold-calling is a surefire way to lose your job when he started his career in sales, quitting after only one day on his first job. He learned from his mistakes and is now President of M3 Learning, a ProActive Sales Management and Sales Training Company and is the sales training leader in Silicon Valley.  Skip has provided training to tens of thousands of sales people and hundreds of companies in over 35 countries. This is his seventh book.

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    The Cambridge Medieval History - Book XVI - William Miller

    THE CAMBRIDGE MEDIEVAL HISTORY - BOOK XVI

    The Decline and Fall of the Eastern Roman Empire

    William Miller, Louis Brehier, Herbert Loewe, Edwin Pears, Paul Collinet, and Charles Diehl

    PERENNIAL PRESS

    Thank you for reading. If you enjoy this book, please leave a review.

    All rights reserved. Aside from brief quotations for media coverage and reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced or distributed in any form without the author’s permission. Thank you for supporting authors and a diverse, creative culture by purchasing this book and complying with copyright laws.

    Copyright © 2016 by William Miller, Louis Brehier, Herbert Loewe, Edwin Pears, Paul Collinet, and Charles Diehl

    Published by Perennial Press

    Interior design by Pronoun

    Distribution by Pronoun

    ISBN: 9781531249809

    TABLE OF CONTENTS

    THE EMPIRE OF NICAEA AND THE RECOVERY OF CONSTANTINOPLE, by William Miller

    THE BALKAN STATES, by William Miller

    ATTEMPTS AT REUNION OF THE GREEK AND LATIN CHURCHES, by Louis Brehier

    THE MONGOLS, by Herbert Loewe

    THE OTTOMAN TURKS TO THE FALL OF CONSTANTINOPLE, by Edwin Pears

    BYZANTINE LEGISLATION FROM THE DEATH OF JUSTINIAN (565) TO 1453, by Paul Collinet

    THE GOVERNMENT AND ADMINISTRATION OF THE BYZANTINE EMPIRE, by Charles Diehl

    BYZANTINE CIVILISATION, by Charles Diehl

    THE EMPIRE OF NICAEA AND THE RECOVERY OF CONSTANTINOPLE, BY WILLIAM MILLER

    ~

    THE CAPTURE OF CONSTANTINOPLE BY the Latins did not for long leave the Greeks without a centre round which to rally. At Trebizond on the shores of the Black Sea, and at Nicaea, the city of the Nicene creed, two Greek Empires rose out of the fragments of that which had fallen, while a third Hellenic principality was founded in Epirus, which in its turn became for a brief period the Empire of Salonica. It was reserved for the second of these creations to reconquer Constantinople and thus to become merged in the restored Byzantine Empire, while the first survived by a little the Turkish conquest of Byzantium.

    Theodore Lascaris, the founder of the Empire of Nicaea, was about thirty years of age at the time of the sack of Constantinople.

    The scion of a distinguished Byzantine family, he had been considered worthy of the hand of the fair Anna, second daughter of the Emperor Alexius III; he had given proof of his courage during the operations against the Bulgarian traitor, Ivanko, in the mountains of Rhodope, and during the siege of the capital; and, despite his rather insignificant personal appearance, these qualities had led to his election in the great church of the Divine Wisdom to the imperial throne, vacant by the flight of Moúrtzouphlos. Without waiting to assume the imperial symbols, he made a last effort to rally the defenders of the city, and then, seeing that all was lost, fled with his wife and his three daughters across the Sea of Marmora and called upon the people of Nicaea to receive him as their lawful sovereign.

    Description of Nicaea

    The spot which was to be the refuge of fallen Hellenism was well chosen. Nicaea was not then the feverish village which six centuries of Turkish rule have made it, but a great and prosperous city. Situated on the lake of Askania, neither too far from the sea for commerce nor too near it for corsairs, it lacked, in the phrase of a native writer, neither safety, nor grace.

    The fertile plains of Bithynia provided it with corn and wine; the lake abounded in fish, and the city in excellent water, while cypresses and other trees rendered it a pleasant residence. No wonder, then, that the Byzantine Emperors had chosen it as the chief town of the Opsician province, that the Selj aq Sultans had made it their capital. The natural defence afforded by the lake, which the crusaders had found such a serious obstacle a century before this time, had been further strengthened by art, and its defenders boasted that it was impregnable. Splendid walls with projecting towers, still surviving in their picturesque decay, then protected the circular city, whose fine houses and richly decorated churches attested the wealth and piety of the inhabitants. Two of these churches, that of the Divine Wisdom and that of the Falling Asleep of the Virgin, still remain, and the mosaics of the latter shew that the praises of the local panegyrist were not exaggerated. Well-organised hospitals sheltered the leper, and it was the boast of the citizens that their philanthropic foundations excelled those of other towns. Such was Nicaea in the thirteenth century.

    The inhabitants at first declined to receive Lascaris within their walls, and it was only with difficulty that he persuaded them to give shelter to his wife. Doubtless in their eyes his father-in-law, Alexius III, was still the lawful Emperor, and their loyalty may have been stimulated by the remembrance of the siege which they had endured at the hands of Andronicus I twenty years before, when they had committed the mistake of taking the wrong side in a civil war. For a time he wandered about Bithynia, trying in vain to obtain recognition, till the aid of Theodore Angelus, brother and successor of the first Despot of Epirus, and an alliance with the Seljuq Sultan, Kai-Khusru I, enabled him to become master of Brusa and the neighbouring country. He was greeted as Despot by his new subjects, a title which policy and the absence of the Patriarch suggested as wiser for the moment than the dignity of Emperor.The founder of this new Greek state had, indeed, many rivals to propitiate or subdue. Asia Minor in 1204 was divided between ten rulers of four different nationalities. While the greater part belonged to the Seljuq Sultans of Iconium, the Cilician kingdom of Armenia occupied the south, and a large colony of Armenians was settled in the Troad. At Trebizond, in the same month in which Constantinople fell, young Alexius, grandson of Andronicus I, established himself with the aid of a Georgian contingent, provided by the care of his paternal aunt Thamar. The family of Comnenus was popular on the Black Sea coast, whence it had originally come, and where men still remembered the residence of the grandfather of Alexius among them, for a tyrant in the capital may often be the idol of the provinces. Accordingly, in the pompous style of that age, he called himself Grand¬Comnenus and Emperor, and his successors preserved both the adjective and the imperial title for 250 years. While Oenaeum and Sinope, as well as Trebizond, declared for the new Emperor, his brother David pushed the fortunes of the family farther to the west; a body of Georgians and native mercenaries helped him to subdue Paphlagonia, the cradle of his race, and he was soon able to proclaim Alexius at Heraclea and to extend the Trapezuntine Empire to the banks of the Sangarius. But the two brothers were not the only Greek competitors of Lascaris. In the middle of the Black Sea coast their conquests were interrupted by the petty sovereignty of Sabbas at Samsun; the old rebel Mankaphas, nicknamed Mad Theodore, who had assumed the imperial title in the time of Isaac II, had once more made himself master of Philadelphia; while Mayrozómes had secured a strong position on the Maeander by giving his daughter’s hand to the Seljuq Sultan. The Latin element was already represented by two Venetian colonies at Lampsacus and at Pegae on the Hellespont, the former a fief of the Quirini; and by a Levantine branch of the great Pisan family of Aldobrandini at Attalia.Partition of Asia Minor

    The partition treaty had assigned large portions of Asia Minor to the Latin Emperor; among them the provinces of Nicomedia, Tarsia, Paphlagonia, Oenaeum and Sinope, Laodicea and the Maeander with the appurtenances of Samsun—in other words practically the whole of the territory occupied by Lascaris and the Grand-Comnenus. In pursuance of this arrangement, Baldwin I granted large territories beyond the Sea of Marmora as fiefs to his faithful followers: Nicaea with the title of Duke, then considered to be one of the greatest dignities of the East, to Count Louis of Blois, a rich and redoubtable noble, who was nephew of the King of England and had held the banner at the coronation of the first Latin Emperor; Philadelphia, likewise coupled with a ducal coronet, to Stephen of Perche. Of the two great religious orders, the Knights of St John received a quarter of the so-called Duchy of Neokastra—the new forts of Adramyttium, Pergamus, and Chliara; the Templars Aldobrandino’s city of Attalia. It was clear from the outset that Lascaris would have to fight for his new dominions against the Latin invader as well as the native enemy.

    The Franks in Asia Minor

    On 1 November 1204 the French Duke of Nicaea sent two trusty henchmen, Pierre de Bracheuil and Payen d’Orleans, with a force of 120 knights to take possession of his Asiatic fief. Landing at the Latin colony of Pegae, where they were sure of a welcome, they occupied the now important town of Panderma, and on 6 December met the army of Lascaris beneath the walls of Poimanenón, a strong castle to the south¬east. Despite the inequality of numbers, the superior prowess of the armoured Frankish knights decided the fate of the battle; the Greeks fled, and the neighbouring city of Lopadium, now the village of Ulubad, but then one of the fairest towns in the country and the bulwark of Prusa, opened its gates to the clemency of the victors. Prusa, however, protected by its strong natural position and its high walls, resisted their attack, and the abandonment of the siege encouraged the native population to revolt against their rule, which, though admittedly humane, was still that of a foreign race and an alien creed. A second detachment of Franks, under the Latin Emperor’s brother, Henry, now accepted the invitation of the Armenians who dwelt in the Troad, and who probably belonged to the Latin faith, to renew the exploits of the Trojan war, one of the few classical memories known to the crusaders. Crossing the Dardanelles to Abydos, Henry traversed the passes of Ida, and established his headquarters at Adramyttium. Thither a second Greek army, under the command of Theodore’s brother Constantine, marched to attack him. But this second pitched battle, fought on 19 March 1205, was even more disastrous to the Greeks than the first; they lost many men and much booty, and the people of the country began to pay tribute to the invaders. A third attempt, this time by the mad tyrant of Philadelphia, was defeated by the personal courage of Henry and the irresistible rush of the French cavalry. This success was completed by the occupation of Nicomedia by a third detachment of Franks under Macaire de Ste. Menehould, the Lord High Steward. Five brief months had sufficed for the conquest of the entire rich province of Opsiciuin and more beside; the whole of north-west Asia Minor from Adramyttium to Nicomedia recognised the Latin Empire; Nicaea and Prusa alone held out for Lascaris.

    At this moment, however, the Greeks of Asia were saved by the nation which they are wont to consider as their greatest enemy in Europe. Their fellow-countrymen in Thrace had summoned Kalojan, the Bulgarian Tsar, against the Franks, and Baldwin felt compelled to recall his brother and the other French leaders from Asia Minor to his aid against this new foe. Henry and the other two detachments hastened to obey his command; of all their conquests they retained only Pegae, as a military and naval base on the Hellespont; and with them the Armenian colony of the Troad crossed over into Europe, for fear of reprisals from the Greeks. Thus abruptly ended the first attempt of the Franks to conquer Asia Minor. The first and last French Duke of Nicaea fell in a Bulgarian ambuscade before Philippopolis, without ever having set foot in his Asiatic duchy.

    Theodore I proclaimed Emperor

    Lascaris availed himself of the departure of the Franks to occupy the places which they had evacuated, and his perseverance seemed to warrant the assumption of the imperial title. It was necessary, however, first to elect a Patriarch; for the Ecumenical throne was vacant. But Nicaea had by this time become the home of all that was most learned in the ecclesiastical world of Greece, so that the election of a Patriarch caused no difficulty. The newly-elected Patriarch hastened to crown Theodore Emperor, and the historian Nicetas composed an address which the monarch was to deliver on this occasion, enforcing the obedience of his subjects and setting forth the reunion of all the Greeks under his sceptre and the recapture of Constantinople as the objects of his reign. Thus, in the spring of 1206, two years after his flight from the fallen city, Theodore Lascaris was crowned at Nicaea.

    No sooner was he invested with the imperial dignity, than he began to carry out the programme which Nicetas had traced for him. A politic truce with Henry, now Latin Emperor and fully occupied in Europe, set him free to turn his undivided attention to his Greek rivals. Mad Theodore, Sabbas, and Mayrozómes were driven from their respective possessions; the two former vanished from history; the third, as the father-in-law of so influential a potentate as Kai-khusru, with whom Lascaris wished to remain at peace, received back a strip of territory, including Chonae, the birthplace of Nicetas himself. The next blow was dealt at the Empire of Trebizond. Alexius had offended the Seljuk Sultan, who besieged his capitals; David, taking advantage of the evacuation of Nicomedia by the French, had sent his young general, Synademis, to occupy that city. But this inexperienced strategist was surprised by the abler Lascaris, who led his troops through a difficult mountain pass and even wielded the axe himself to remove the trees from his path. Such energy was bound to be successful; Synadencis was taken prisoner; David was forced to restrict the Trapezuntine frontier to Heraclea, and even from there the Emperor of Nicaea threatened to drive him farther eastward. At this, in self-preservation, David called in the Franks to his aid.

    The Franks had been ready to ally themselves with the sole remaining Greek rival of Lascaris, for they complained that he had broken his truce with them, and they were anxious to prevent the growth of a Greek naval power, of which he had laid the foundations under the guidance of a Calabrian corsairs. Accordingly, towards the end of 1206, Henry sent Pierre de Bracheuil and Payen d’Orleans for the second time to Asia Minor, with the promise that Bracheuil should have Pegae and Cyzicus with the island of Marmora as a fief, while Thierri de Loos, the Seneschal of the Latin Empire, was invested with Nicomedia. This second Frankish invasion repeated on a smaller scale the achievements of the first. From Pegae as a base Bracheuil occupied and refortified the peninsula of Cyzicus, and the Seneschal, sailing direct from Constantinople to Nicomedia, speedily converted its beautiful minster of the Divine Wisdom into his castle. Two other French nobles, Macaire de Ste. Menehould and Guillaume de Sains, established themselves at Hereke to the north of the Gulf of Izmid and at Gemlik, or Civitot, as the crusaders called it, the port of Nicaea and Prusa, thus cutting off both those cities from the sea. Thus hemmed in by the Franks, Lascaris sent envoys to the Bulgarian Tsar, urging him to attack Constantinople. Once again Kaloj an created a welcome diversion in Thrace, and once again it was necessary to recall the French to Europe. Only small garrisons were left to hold the Frankish quadrilateral.Theodore at once proceeded to attack these isolated fortresses. So fierce was the fighting at Civitot, that only five of its brave defenders remained unwounded when Henry arrived in haste from Constantinople to its relief, and such was its condition that he decided to withdraw the garrison and abandon it. Cyzicus was so closely invested by land and sea that a second expedition was required to raise the siege; Thierri de Loos was captured outside the walls of Nicomedia, and its fortified minster would have been taken, had not Henry returned to save it. Then a truce for two years was concluded; the Greeks released their prisoners, the French evacuated Cyzicus and Nicomedia, and their fortifications were destroyed. Pegae seems already to have fallen; only Hereke remained Frankish.

    The truce, though equally beneficial to both parties, was soon broken. David, ever on the watch for an opportunity of attacking the rival Emperor of the East, wrote to Constantinople, begging that he might be included among the subjects, and that his land might be considered a part, of the Latin Empire. Thus sure of Henry’s support, he crossed the Sangarius, invaded the dominions of Lascaris with a body of Frankish auxiliaries, and at first carried all before him. But Theodore’s general, Andronicus Gidos, suddenly fell upon the Franks at a moment when they were isolated in the Rough Passes of Nicomedia; scarcely a man survived to tell the tale. Assistance sent by Henry merely postponed the fall of Heraclea, which was annexed with Amastris to the Empire of Nicaea. The only important Frankish success was the recovery of Pegae by its feudal lord, Pierre de Bracheuil. No wonder that Lascaris complained to the Pope of such breaches of the truce, begged his Holiness to induce the Franks to conclude a permanent peace with him, making the sea the boundary between him and them, and threatened, if these terms were refused, to join the Bulgarians against them. Innocent III replied bidding him render homage to the Emperor Henry and obedience to the Holy Father, whose legate might then intervene on his behalf at Constantinople. Theodore’s response was an attempt to recapture the imperial city, an enterprise in which he was aided by the French lord of Pegae, turned traitor to his lawful sovereign. Thus early were the Latins divided against themselves, and even men of good family entered the service of the Greeks.

    Defeat and death of Kai-Khusru I

    A new enemy, and one of his own household, now arose to disturb the career of Lascaris and the peace of Asia Minor. The fugitive Emperor Alexius III, after wandering about Europe, arrived at the court of Kai-Khusru, whom, years before, he had sheltered, baptised, and adopted at Constantinople. The dethroned monarch begged the Sultan to obtain for him, as the rightful Emperor of the Greeks, the crown which his son-in-law had usurped. Thinking that his guest might prove a serviceable instrument of his own designs, the ambitious Sultan, who had not forgotten that his predecessors had once ruled at Nicaea, sent an ultimatum to Theodore, offering him the alternative of instant abdication or war. Theodore’s reply was to march against him to Antioch on the Maeander, whither he had advanced with Alexius. The battle was at first unfavourable to Lascaris; 800 Latin mercenaries, who, despite the Papal excommunication, accompanied him, were annihilated, and the Sultan struck him a tremendous blow on the head, which caused him to fall from his horse. For a moment the Emperor seemed at the mercy of his opponent; but with great presence of mind he drew his sword, and severed the hind legs of the mare which the Sultan rode. Kai-Khusru fell; in an instant his head was cut off, and stuck on a spear in full sight of his army. Deprived of their leader, the Seljuqs were glad to make peace; the victor took Alexius with him to Nicaea, blinded him (according to one account), and placed him in the monastery of Hyakinthos, where he died. So dramatic a triumph inspired the imagination, or rather the rhetoric, of the two chief living men of letters. Nicetas composed a panegyric of the victor who had routed the hitherto invincible Turks, and his brother, the ex-Metropolitan of Athens, sent a letter of congratulation from his exile in Ceos, in which he compared Lascaris to Hercules and Basil the Bulgar-slayer. Lascaris himself issued a manifesto to the Greek world, promising that, if all his countrymen would but help him, he would soon free the land from the Latin dogs; and they offered their aid if he would attack Constantinople.

    Third Frankish Invasion

    The news had, however, a very different effect upon the Latin Emperor. His comment on the victory was that the victor had been vanquished, for he reckoned the loss of the Latin mercenaries as more than counterbalancing the defeat of the Turks. He knew, however, that the Greeks were flushed with their success and meditated an assault upon the imperial city, so he resolved to wait no longer, but attack them first. Accordingly he crossed to Pegae, now the sole possession of the Franks in Asia Minor, and held since Bracheuil’s treachery by Henri de Grangerin, whereupon Lascaris took to the mountains. The murmurs of his own subjects, whose property was thus exposed to the raids of the Frankish cavalry, forced the Greek Emperor, however, to give battle. The two armies met at the river Rhyndakos on 15 October 1211, and although the Greek host was greatly superior in numbers and was aided by a fresh band of Latin renegades, the victory rested with Henry, who, according to the account which he has left us of this campaign, did not lose a single man. At this the Greeks right up to the Seljuq frontier submitted to the victor, whose kindness to the vanquished was proverbial. A few castles alone held out for Theodore, and Henry announced from Pergamus to all his friends his triumph over the four enemies of his empire, of whom Lascaris was the first and foremost. Ere long his standards had reached as far south as Nymphaeum near Smyrna, as far east as Poimanendn and Lentiana near Prusa. But it was easier to overrun Asia Minor than to hold it, for the Franks were but a handful of men, and Henry appealed in vain for military colonists from the west. He therefore came to terms with his adversary: he was to retain the Troad and north-west Asia Minor as far as Lopadium; to the east of that, and from Adramyttium southward to Smyrna, lay the dominions of Lascaris; a neutral uninhabited zone was left between the two Empires and a strong frontier guard prevented emigration from one to the other. Even this restricted Frankish territory was perforce entrusted to the charge of a Greek garrison under a Greek commander.

    Theodore had made what proved to be a durable peace with the Franks, broken only by a raid of the Duke of Naxos which he avenged by the capture of his enemy; but the new Seljuq Sultan, Kai-Kaus I, had not forgotten the death of his father. In 1214 or 1215, a fortunate raid delivered the Greek Emperor into his hand; his first impulse was to kill his prisoner, but he contented himself with a ransom and the cession of several castles and towns. Such sudden reverses of fortune were characteristic of this period of Greek history. Kai-Kaus continued his career of conquest, took Sinope from the Empire of Trebizond, slew David, who commanded there, and compelled the Emperor Alexius to pay tribute and to render him military service.

    Theodore’s death. His character

    For several years Theodore remained at peace with the Latin Emperor, while the hand of his own sister secured him the friendship of the Duke of Naxos. He had meanwhile been left a widower; and, after an unfortunate alliance with an Armenian princess, he married the daughter of the Latin Empress Yolande, Maria de Courtenay, a politic match which might give him a claim to her brother’s throne. In fact, during the interregnum which elapsed before the arrival of the Emperor Robert at Constantinople in 1221, he planned a second attack upon that city. His plan was frustrated by a counter-attack; he made peace with his brother-in-law, and was only prevented by death from strengthening their relationship and therewith his own claims by giving the hand of his daughter Eudocia to Robert. He died in 1222, and was laid beside his first wife and her father Alexius III in the monastery of Hyakinthos at Nicaea. He had living one son by his Armenian consort, but as this child was only eight years old, he bequeathed his empire to the second husband of his eldest daughter—John Ducas Vatatzes.

    The Greeks, as their historians acknowledged, owed a great debt to Theodore Lascaris as the re-founder of the fallen empire. In the face of great difficulties he obtained recognition as the leader of Hellenism in Asia, and even the Franks admired his courage and his military skill. He was generous to his friends, and if he once, as was said, flayed an enemy alive, the man was a double-dyed traitor and a disgrace to French chivalry. As a diplomatist, he showed the audacity which the times demanded, and availed himself of those opportunities for playing off one race against another which the Eastern question has always afforded; while he displayed the talent of a constructive statesman in making his new capital the centre of all that was best in the Greek world. From Euboea and Thrace, as well as from Byzantium, the local aristocracy flocked to his court; he and his family were addressed by the begging-letter writers of the Bosphorus; he sheltered the historian Nicetas, who repaid him by three panegyrics, and he tried to attract the historian’s brother from his lonely island. Under his auspices, Nicaea became a learned city, where rhetoric and poetry could be studied, while at Smyrna Demetrius Karykes, called the chief of philosophers, gave lectures on logic. But the patriotism and common-sense of the sovereign made him discourage those nice theological discussions which were the delight of Byzantine divines, and which might have been expected to find a congenial atmosphere in the city which had witnessed two great Councils of the Church. Theodore was, however, fully alive to the value of the hierarchy as a national and political force. He had established the Patriarchate in his capital, and he supported the efforts of the Patriarch for the Union of the Churches at a synod to be held there. But this scheme failed; both the Greeks of Epirus and the Greeks of Trebizond declined to acknowledge the authority of the Patriarch of Nicaea, whose actual jurisdiction was further restricted by the creation of an autocephalous Serbian Church and of two Latin bishoprics, one at Nicomedia, the other at Troy.

    1715x701During the later and more peaceful years of his reign, Theodore encouraged trade with the Venetians, to whom he granted freedom from customs’ dues throughout his empire, and for this a proper system of coinage was required. Five issues of gold coins bear his image and superscription, while inscriptions on towers at Prusa, at Nicaea, and at Bender-Eregli still preserve his name and serve as an example of the many buildings which he erected.

    In the same year as Theodore, died his rival, the first Emperor of Trebizond. Cut off by the Turkish occupation of Sinope from all hope of expansion to the west, he seems to have turned his attention to the northern coast of the Black Sea, and to have made the Crimea tributary to Trebizond. His Asiatic Empire now extended no farther westward than Oenaeum and the river Therm odon, while Savastopoli 18 hours beyond Trebizond was its eastern boundary. But his capital was deemed impregnable, alike by nature and art. Its mild climate, its vineyards and oliveyards, its excellent water, and its abundant supply of wood combined to make it, in the phrase of an enthusiastic panegyrist, the apple of the eye of all Asia. It had long been under the special protection of St Eugenius, whose monastery, and that of the Golden-headed Virgin, were already features of the city.

    John III Vatatzes succeeds

    John III Vatatzes, the second Emperor of Nicaea, was not long allowed to occupy the throne unopposed. Two of Theodore’s brothers could not brook the succession of this Thracian nobleman, who, if he belonged to a good family and had held high office at Court, was only connected by marriage with the founder of the Empire. By money and promises they raised a Frankish force at Constantinople, and returned at its head to Asia Minor. Vatatzes met them near Poimanendn, the scene of the battle twenty years before, and by his personal courage won a decisive victory. Four neighbouring Frankish fortresses fell into his hands, and in 1225 the Latin Emperor was glad to obtain peace by the cession of Pegae. The Franks, in the words of one of their own chroniclers, lost nearly all the land which had been won beyond the Hellespont; they abandoned the Troad, and retained nothing but the territory near Constantinople and Nicomedia. Well might the enthusiastic Patriarch bid them begone to their own country. Even beyond the coasts of Asia Minor the long arm of the Greek Emperor smote them. His fleet not only watched the Dardanelles from the former factory of the Quirini at Lampsacus and intercepted vessels coming from the west to Constantinople, but captured the four islands of Lesbos, Chios, Samos, and Icaria, which had been assigned to the Latin Empire by the partition treaty. An expedition in 1233 against Leo Gabalas, the Lord of Rhodes and the Cyclades, who bore the proud title of Caesar, and asserted his independence of the Greek Emperor, failed, however, to take his famous fortress. Another naval undertaking in aid of the Cretans, who had risen against Venice, was equally unsuccessful. The Emperor’s troops did, indeed, capture several Cretan fortresses, and a detachment of them held out for some years in the island. But the expedition cost him nearly the whole of his fleet, shipwrecked in a storm off the island of Cerigo.

    Conspiracies against Vatatzes

    Vatatzes had defeated the Franks; but he still had enemies to fear within his own court. The capture of the late sovereign’s brothers at the battle of Poimanemin, and the loss of their eyesight as the penalty of their treason, had rendered them harmless; but a fresh conspiracy, organised by his first cousin Nestóngos and several other magnates, was discovered at the very moment when he was fighting against his country’s foes. The Emperor’s clemency towards the principal conspirator, who was merely imprisoned and then allowed to escape, surprised his contemporaries. But from that moment he surrounded himself with guards, and listened to the prayers of his wife that he would be careful of a life so valuable to his country. It was probably about this time that he moved the capital to Nymphaeum, his favourite winter residence, which thenceforth continued to be the seat of government till the recapture of Constantinople, while the fertile plain near Clazomenae was chosen as the imperial villeggiatura in spring. Nicaea remained, however, the seat of the Patriarch, and it was there that the Emperors were crowned.

    The election of the old warrior John of Brienne as Latin Emperor inspired the Franks with the hope of recovering the territory which they had lost in Asia Minor by the last peace. One of the conditions of his election was that he should have the Duchy of Nicomedia, and that the Kingdom of Nicaea with all its appurtenances and all the land that the Latins ever possessed beyond the Hellespont, comprising the Duchy of Neokastra, should become the domain of Baldwin II. John waited patiently till he had made adequate preparations for the reconquest of these hypothetical kingdoms and duchies and till a favourable moment for attack should arrive. The exhaustion of the Greek forces after their unsuccessful expedition against Rhodes in 1233 seemed to be a suitable opportunity, and the Latin Emperor landed at Lampsacus. But Vatatzes, though his forces were diminished in numbers, proved himself so clever a strategist that he compelled his adversaries to hug the shore where their fleet was constantly at hand. One important success, the recapture of Pegae, was the sole result of this long-planned campaign. John returned to Constantinople, nor did the Franks re-attempt the invasion of Asia Minor. Henceforth it was not they but the rejuvenated Greek Empire which could take the offensive, and it became the object of Vatatzes to carry out the aspirations of his predecessor and drive them from their diminished dominions alike in Europe and in Asia.

    Greco-Bulgarian Alliance

    With this policy in view, he sought an alliance with the hereditary enemy of his race, the Bulgarian Tsar, John Asen II, whose signal victory over the victorious Greeks of Epirus on the field of Klokotinitza had made him the dominant factor in Balkan politics. The engagement of their children, both still in the schoolroom, seemed to guarantee their co-operation against the Franks, and Vatatzes celebrated the capture of the Venetian colony of Gallipoli and the betrothal of his son Theodore in rapid succession. Thrace was soon almost entirely freed from the Latins, and the Empire of Nicaea for the first time extended into Europe, where the river Maritza became the frontier between the Greek and the Slavonic states. The allies even laid siege to Constantinople with infinite thousands of armed men, till the approaching winter of 1235 compelled them to return to their homes. In the following year they renewed the siege by land and sea, but this time the united forces of the Latins repulsed their attack. Had they been successful, the Greeks and the Bulgarians would have quarrelled over the possession of the city which both coveted. As it was, the unnatural alliance grew weaker as one ally realised what he had had to sacrifice and the other what he had assisted to restore. The Greek Emperor could not but regret that the price which he had to pay for the Bulgarian’s aid was the recognition of the independence of the Church of Trnovo and its separation from the jurisdiction of the Ecumenical Patriarch. The Bulgarian Tsar could not fail to perceive that he had exchanged a weak and tottering neighbour for a vigorous and powerful prince, and that on the ruins of the alien Latin Empire he was reinstating a national dynasty which would bar the way to Byzantium and the Aegean. Personal and theological influences further combined to break up the alliance. Asen’s consort, a Hungarian princess, was connected with the reigning family of Constantinople; while Pope Gregory IX, who had hopes of converting the Bulgarian Tsar to the Roman faith, denounced Vatatzes as the enemy of God and the Church, and received from him a haughty letter, in which the Greek ruler claimed to be the real Emperor as the heir of Constantine, and plainly told the Pontiff that, if he had yielded to superior force, he had not relinquished his rights, but would never desist from besieging Constantinople.

    Triple League against Vatatzes

    Asen accordingly resolved to abandon his ally; he obtained possession of his daughter on the pretext of a father’s natural longing to see her, and then demonstrated his paternal affection by chastising the damsel when she lamented her enforced separation from her youthful husband and his kind parents. The appearance of a new factor in Balkan politics at this moment facilitated the formation of a triple alliance against the Greek Emperor. The Cumans, a horde of savages from the Caspian, driven from their home by the Mongol invasion, had crossed the Danube and penetrated as far south as Thrace. With them and with the Bulgarians the Franks of Constantinople formed a league against Vatatzes, for all three races had a common interest in driving him from his newly-won possessions on Thracian soil. Their first effort was the siege of Tzurulum, the modern Chorlu, between the present railway and the Sea of Marmora, then an important fortress and the key of the Greek position in Europe. The place was defended by one of those generals who are better known for their good luck than for their good strategy. On the present occasion the commander’s reputation was once more verified; in the midst of the siege the news reached Asen that his wife, one of his children, and the newly-created Patriarch were dead. This triple calamity dissolved the triple alliance; the pious Bulgarian saw in his affliction the judgment of Heaven for his breach of faith; he sent his daughter back to the court of Vatatzes, and made peace with the Greeks. The Franks and the Cumans, however, only waited for reinforcements to renew the attack; at this second attempt Chorlu fell, and its commander, a better but a less fortunate soldier than his predecessor, was taken a prisoner to Constantinople. So important did the capture of this fortress seem to the Latin Emperor that he wrote a letter to King Henry III of England, setting forth the political results of its submission. It was some compensation for this loss that Vatatzes captured two of the fortresses (Gebseh and Tusla, now stations on the Anatolian railway) which the Franks still possessed between Nicomedia and Constantinople. The Greek frontier was thus little more than twenty miles from the imperial city. But the defeat of the Greek navy, manned by raw sailors and commanded by an inexperienced Armenian, prevented a further advance.

    Before renewing his attack upon the Latin Empire, Vatatzes resolved to realise the dream of his predecessor and reunite all the Greeks under one sceptre. The Emperors of Nicaea had viewed with suspicion the growth of an independent Greek principality in Epirus under the despots of the house of Angelus; and, when the despotat of Epirus became the Empire of Salonica, this assumption of the imperial title bitterly offended the only true Emperor of the Romans at Nicaea. Theological controversies between the ecclesiastical authorities of the two rival Greek states further envenomed their relations, and the resentment of the Nicene divines was doubtless all the deeper because the logic and the learning of the Epirote party were superior to their own. Accordingly, the Asiatic Greeks had viewed with equanimity the capture of the Emperor of Salonica by the Bulgarians at the battle of Klokotinitza. But although Theodore Angelus was a prisoner and blinded, his brother Manuel continued to rule at Salonica, with the permission of the Bulgarian Tsar, till the latter, smitten with the charms of his blind captive’s daughter, made her his wife and set her father free to plot against Manuel. The plot succeeded; incapacitated by the loss of his sight from reigning himself, Theodore placed his son John on the imperial throne of Salonica, while Manuel sought an asylum at the court of Vatatzes, thus providing his diplomatic host with an excuse for intervention in the affairs of the sister-state. He had no difficulty in pleading his cause, for Vatatzes had long had a casus belli against the Empire of Salonica. In 1225 Theodore had cheated him out of the good city of Hadrianople, which he had sent his officers, at the invitation of the inhabitants, to occupy in his name. He now avenged himself by furnishing Theodore’s exiled brother with the means of taking a large part of Thessaly. But Manuel had no sooner achieved this object than he threw over his benefactor and made his peace with Theodore. Thus the first move failed; Salonica had outwitted Nicaea. Vatatzes, however, could afford to wait.

    First attack on Salonica

    In 1241 the favourable moment seemed to have arrived. The great Bulgarian Tsar had died, leaving a child as his successor; Manuel had died also; while the Emperor John of Salonica, whom nature had intended for a monk rather than a sovereign, relied upon the advice of his old blind father. A truce with the Latin Empire left Vatatzes at liberty to devote his whole energies to his long-cherished design. He first enticed old Theodore to his court, and flattered the childish vanity of that experienced ruler by calling him uncle and giving him a seat at his own table. When all was ready, in the spring of 1242, he crossed over into Europe and began the first fratiicidal war between the two Greek Empires of Nicaea and Salonica. Aided by a body of Curran mercenaries whom he had attracted to his service, he marched along the coast so as not to violate Bulgarian territory, and met with no resistance till he arrived within about eight stades of his rival’s capital. The size and strength of Salonica rendered difficult the use of siege-engines; and, while Vatatzes was still ravaging the neighbourhood, the news arrived that the dreaded Mongols had defeated the Seljuqs of Iconium and were threatening his Asiatic dominions. Keeping the fatal secret to himself, he made the best terms he could with the Emperor John through the medium of old Theodore. His vanity was perforce contented with the degradation of his rival to the rank of a Despot, who no longer outraged the Byzantine protocol by wearing the imperial emblems.

    Reconquest of Macedonia from the Bulgarians

    The Mongol peril and internal affairs kept Vatatzes occupied in Asia during the next few years, for he had pledged himself to aid the new Seljuq Sultan, Kai-Khusru II, against this common enemy of both. But, as soon as the Mongols abandoned their attack on Iconium for other enterprises, he bethought himself once more of his European possessions. John of Salonica was now dead, and his brother, the Despot Demetrius, who had received his title from the Emperor of Nicaea, was a man of loose and vicious habits, which rendered him unpopular. It was therefore obvious that his position was insecure and that Vatatzes only needed a plausible excuse for the annexation of Salonica. His western frontier had now advanced from the Maritza to a place called Zichna near Seres, and only a small strip of Bulgarian territory served as a buffer-state between the two Greek Empires. A coincidence enabled him in the same year to conquer this Slavonic outpost of Salonica and Salonica itself.

    In the autumn of 1246 he was returning from a tour of inspection in his European dominions. On the banks of the Maritza he received the news that the young Bulgarian Tsar Kaliman was dead, and that his still younger brother, Michael Asen, had succeeded him. The temptation to attack the Bulgarians at such a moment was great, for Greek rulers have ever been haunted by the vision of Basil the Bulgar-slayer. Accordingly Vatatzes returned at once to Philippi, and there on the historic battle-field summoned a council of war to consider the question. Some argued against the proposal, on the ground that the army was weak and that the citadel of Seres, the first Bulgarian fortress,

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