Decline and fall byzan.., p.52
Decline & Fall - Byzantium 03, page 52
part #3 of Byzantium Series
He found the situation slightly easier than when he had left it almost a year before. Peace had at last been made with the Sultan. The cost had been heavy - a sizeable annual tribute and the return of those parts of the Marmara and Black Sea coasts that had been previously granted by Suleyman and Mehmet - but at least the people of Constantinople could sleep securely in their beds without fearing the imminent reappearance of the Turkish siege engines. It was, perhaps, with some surprise that John found his father still alive. Old Manuel had never properly recovered from his stroke; by now he was permanently bed-ridden and sinking fast. His mind, however, remained clear, and he continued to worry over what he considered his son's excessive ambitions, summoning him to his chamber for long conversations about the dangers of antagonizing the Sultan unnecessarily and of going too far in the direction of Church union. After one of these talks, which had ended with John leaving the room tight-lipped and silent, Manuel turned to his old friend, the historian George Sphrantzes, and said:
At other times in our history, my son might have been a great basileus; but he is not for the present time, for he sees and thinks on a grand scale, in a manner which would have been appropriate in the prosperous days of our forefathers. But today, with our troubles closing in upon us from every side, our Empire needs not a great basileus but a good manager. And I fear that his grandiose schemes and endeavours may bring ruin upon this house.
Soon afterwards, following the time-honoured tradition, the old Emperor took monastic vows and donned a monk's habit, taking the name of Matthew. It was in this guise that he celebrated his seventy-fifth birthday on 27 June 1425. Just twenty-five days later the end came. He was buried the same day in the monastery church of the Pantocrator, the funeral oration being delivered by the twenty-five-year-old monk Bessarion, of whom we shall be hearing more before this story is done. Sphrantzes tells us that he was mourned more deeply and by more people than any of his predecessors. If so, it was no more than he deserved.
23
Laetentur Coeli!
[1425-48]
As the metropolitans disembarked from the ships the citizens greeted them as was customary, asking 'What of our business? What of the Council? Did we prevail?' And they answered: 'We have sold our faith; we have exchanged true piety for impiety; we have betrayed the pure sacrifice and become upholders of unleavened bread.'
Michael Ducas
The Empire of which, on 21 July 1425, the thirty-two-year-old John Palaeologus became sole basileus was effectively bounded by the walls of Constantinople; and Constantinople now presented a dismal picture indeed. Already in 1403, Ruy Gonzalez de Clavijo had remarked on its strange emptiness:
Despite its size and the huge circuit of its walls, it is poorly populated; for in the midst of it are a number of hills and valleys on which there are fields of corn and vineyards and many orchards; and in these cultivated areas the houses are clustered together like villages; and this is in the midst of the city.
Nearly a quarter of a century later, after three sieges — each of which resulted in the flight of many hundreds of citizens, the majority of whom never returned - and several visitations of the plague, the population must have declined still more dramatically. Precise figures are hard to estimate, but by 1425 the inhabitants are unlikely to have numbered more than fifty thousand, and may well have been considerably less.
Economically, too, the Empire was in desperate straits. Once the richest and busiest commercial centre in the civilized world, Constantinople had seen her trade taken over lock, stock and barrel by the Venetians and the Genoese; now they too had suffered from the constant warfare and political instability, and a few paltry customs dues were all that ever trickled into the Byzantine exchequer. The coinage, already debased, was devalued again and again. Thanks to the successive sieges and the depopulation, the system of food distribution was on the point of collapse and frequently broke down altogether. The people were thus chronically undernourished, and their low resistance to disease caused one epidemic after another to rage unchecked through the city.
The simultaneous lack of manpower and of money made it impossible to keep the buildings in repair. Nearly all were by now seriously dilapidated. Many of the churches were little more than empty shells. Constantine's great Hippodrome, rapidly falling into ruin, was used as a polo ground. The Patriarch had long since deserted his palace in favour of somewhere warmer and drier. Even the imperial Palace of Blachernae was crumbling. Later in John's reign another Castilian traveller, Pero Tafur, was to report that
The Emperor's palace must have been very magnificent, but now it is in such state that both it and the city show well the evils which the people have suffered, and which they still endure .. . Inside, the building is badly maintained, except for those parts where the Emperor, the Empress and their attendants can live, although these are sorely cramped for space. The Emperor's state is as splendid as ever, for nothing is omitted from the ancient ceremonies; but, properly regarded, he is as a bishop without a see ...
The city is sparsely populated. It is divided into districts, that by the seashore having the greatest population. The inhabitants are not well clad but are poor and shabby, showing all too well the hardship of their lot - which is however less bad than they deserve, for they are a vicious people, steeped in sin.
It was not an inspiring inheritance; and John must often have thought with envy of his younger brothers. One, the Despot Constantine, was admittedly not much better off: since his father's death he had governed a relatively small area covering the northern approaches to Constantinople, which the Turks had recently allowed the Empire to retain in fief; it included the port of Selymbria and the cities of Mesembria and Anchialus on the Black Sea coast. Strategically it was not without importance; but the Emperor held it only as the vassal of the Sultan, and it is hard to see what he or Constantine could have done if Murad had decided to take it back, or even to advance through it on his way to launch another attack on the capital. The other four of Manuel's sons were all in the Morea - an unmistakable indication of the importance which the southern Despotate had by now assumed in the thinking of the Palaeologi. Their reasons are equally clear. The Morea could be defended; Constantinople could not. The latter, admittedly, still had its Land Walls, which had never yet been breached and which had stood fast against three major sieges in the past quarter-century alone. But during that time the process of depopulation had continued remorselessly; every day saw a further decrease in the number of able-bodied men and women able to rally to the city's defence. Worse still was the failure of morale. Few intelligent people any longer cherished a real hope of deliverance. Western Europe had proved itself a broken reed. The Turks - after a brief setback - were now, under the determined and implacable Murad II, as strong as they had ever been. It was all too likely that when (as he surely would) he decided on yet another siege of the city, its inhabitants might make a voluntary surrender - if only to spare themselves the massacre and rapine which would inevitably follow if they did not.
The Morea, on the other hand, was relatively secure. True, it had suffered considerable devastation as recently as 1423, when an army of Turks had invaded Albania and then swept down through Thessaly, seeming almost to ignore Manuel's much-vaunted Hexamilion. But they had not remained for long, the wall had since been heightened and strengthened, and Venice - understandably alarmed at the prospect of a Turkish presence on the Adriatic shore - had promised to come to the rescue if the incident were ever repeated. Already Venetian ships patrolled the coasts, where they were more than a match for the still rudimentary Turkish navy. There remained a few French and Italian princelings ruling their little enclaves amid the mountain valleys; but they had lost much of their former power, and no longer threatened any serious trouble.
Inevitably, there were a few problems. The Peloponnesians, Manuel had complained ten years before, seemed to love fighting for its own sake. The Despots spent most of their time trying to reconcile one faction against another - a task which was not made easier by the fact that the local Greek nobility felt no loyalty to Byzantium and openly resented what they saw as a foreign ascendancy, foisted on them from distant Constantinople. Compared to those in the capital, however, conditions in the Morea were pleasant indeed; and by 1425 few people, offered the alternatives of living in Constantinople or in Mistra, would have hesitated at the choice.
The city of Mistra, lying on the slopes of the Taygetus range in the southern Peloponnese, had been founded by William of Villehardouin, great-nephew of the chronicler of the Fourth Crusade, in 1249. Just twelve years later, after the reconquest of Constantinople by Michael Palaeologus, William had been obliged to surrender it - together with Monemvasia and the fortress of Maina on Cape Matapan - to Byzantium. For much of the next half-century it had remained little more than a small and remote Greek enclave, set deep in Frankish territory; not surprisingly, the Byzantine Governor preferred to reside at Monemvasia, from which he could keep in regular touch with the capital. As time went on, however, the Greek province steadily grew in size, the Latins retreated, and Monemvasia itself became an outpost. By 1289 we find the Kephale, as he was called, settled more centrally in Mistra; and thus it was to Mistra that the Emperor John VI Cantacuzenus had sent his son Manuel, first Despot of the Morea, in 1349 - exactly a hundred years after the city's foundation.
Manuel had been succeeded by Theodore Palaeologus, fourth son of John V, on whose death in 1407 the Despotate had passed to his nephew and namesake, Theodore II. By this time Mistra had developed into something far more than a mere provincial capital. It was now an artistic, intellectual and religious centre comparable with what Constantinople had been a century before. Its first important church had been built shortly before 1300; and a few years later this was incorporated into a large monastery, the Brontochion - which in turn gave rise to a second church, dedicated to the Virgin Hodegetria, 'she who points the way'. By this time the Metropolitan Church of St Demetrius was already almost completed; two other great churches, the Pantanassa and the Peribleptos, followed soon afterwards, possibly at the instigation of the Despot Manuel. He was certainly responsible for the church of St Sophia, which was used as the palace chapel. Alas, all these buildings have been wholly or partly ruined; but many of their frescoes -particularly those of the Peribleptos - still have the power to catch the breath.
These churches alone are enough to show the extent to which Mistra attracted the greatest artists in the Byzantine world; it was equally active in the field of scholarship. Manuel Cantacuzenus and his brother Matthew - who was technically co-Despot with him after 1361, although he left the business of government in Manuel's hands - were both highly cultivated men, while their father John, the ex-Emperor and one of the greatest scholars of his time, was a regular visitor to Mistra and had indeed died there in 1383. Small wonder was it that others followed. Among them were the famous Metropolitan Bessarion of Nicaea and the future Metropolitan Isidore of Kiev - both of whom were later to become cardinals in the Church of Rome - and the philosopher and theologian
George Scholarius, who under the name of Gennadius II would be the first Patriarch of Constantinople after the fall of the city. The greatest moment, however, in the intellectual life of Mistra was unquestionably that of the arrival in the city of the most original of all Byzantine thinkers, George Gemistos Plethon.
Unlike the rest, Plethon did not come to Mistra of his own free will. At an early age he had fallen foul of the Orthodox establishment. They had been shocked by his stay of several years in Turkish-held Adrianople - where he had studied Aristotle, Zoroastrianism and Jewish cabbalistic philosophy — and seriously alarmed when he gave a course of what they considered to be highly subversive lectures on Platonism at the university; he might well have been arraigned on charges of heresy had not the Emperor Manuel, his friend and admirer, suggested that he might find Mistra a more congenial environment. Plethon asked nothing better. He was acutely aware that Byzantium was the inheritor, not only of the Roman Empire, but of the literature and civilization of classical Greece; and he was happier living and teaching where the ancient Greeks had lived and taught than in what to them had been a barbarian land. Moreover, as a good Platonist he shared his master's frequently-expressed disapproval of Athenian democracy, infinitely preferring the discipline of Sparta; at Mistra, only some five miles away from the ruins of the ancient city, he could almost feel that he was there.
Apart from his year in Italy - to be described later in this chapter - Plethon remained for the rest of his life at Mistra. There he was a member of the Senate and a senior magistrate; but he saw himself primarily as the official court philosopher of the Despotate, in the old tradition of Plato at Syracuse or even of Socrates himself, strolling up and down the local agora with his disciples and — always inspired by the Spartan ethos - endlessly developing an elaborate scheme for the reform, the defence and ultimately the salvation of the Morea. This involved reliance on a standing army of citizen Greeks rather than on foreign mercenaries, on strict sumptuary laws and on rigorous standards of temperance and dedication. Land would be held in common; the import and export trades would be closely regulated; monks would be forced to work and make a proper contribution to society. All these reforms were formally proposed by Plethon in a whole series of memoranda, addressed to the Emperor Manuel and his son the Despot Theodore between 1415 and 1418, but it was no use: even at this critical moment in their history, the regime he advocated was too authoritarian, too socialist — in a word, too Spartan - for the Byzantines. They preferred, as they always had, to put their trust in God and the Holy Virgin; if any reforms were necessary, they must be achieved not in the political or social fields but in the hearts of men.
They would have been even more wary of Plethon had they known the directions his thought was taking him. His last work, On the Laws, completed only towards the end of his life - he was not to die till 1452, when he was ninety - seems to have proposed a new and extremely idiosyncratic religion, based partly on Persian Zoroastrianism and partly on the old Greek pantheon, where the ancient deities were revived -though more as symbols than anything else - and subordinated to an almighty Zeus. Sad to say, we know this curious composition only from its table of contents; virtually all the rest was destroyed after the author's death by his horrified friend George Scholarius, the future Patriarch. But though George Gemistos Plethon may have died a prophet with relatively little honour in his own country, in Europe - and above all in Renaissance Italy - he was deeply venerated. Not only was Cosimo de' Medici to found the Academy at Florence in his honour; in 1465, when that most cultivated of condottieri, Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta of Rimini, entered Mistra at the head of a Venetian army, he removed Plethon's body from its simple grave and took it back with him to his native city. There it still lies, in the magnificent tomb he built for it in the cathedral church of S. Francesco, a proud inscription paying tribute to 'the greatest Philosopher of his time'.
During the first five years of the new reign, things went well for the Despotate of the Morea. In 1427 John VIII, accompanied by his brother Constantine and George Sphrantzes, personally led a campaign which destroyed the fleet of Carlo Tocco, Lord of Cephalonia and Epirus, at the mouth of the Gulf of Patras. By the terms of the resulting treaty Tocco gave his niece Maddalena in marriage to Constantine, together with the region of Elis and the port of Clarenza (the modern Killini) in the north-western Peloponnese. Two years later Constantine wrested Patras itself from the control of its Latin Archbishop, even gaining recognition from Sultan Murad of its return to the Despotate; and by 1430 most of the Morea - with the important exceptions of the Venetian-held harbours of Corone, Modone and Nauplia - was back in Greek hands.
Progress in the south, however, was outweighed by disaster further north; for in March 1430 the city of Thessalonica fell once again to the Sultan. Its seven years under the banner of St Mark had not been a success. The Turks had maintained their blockade; meanwhile, as the Venetian governors persisted in ignoring the formal undertakings made at the time of the transfer of power, local resentment had steadily increased to the point where many of the inhabitants were shamelessly in favour of opening the gates to the infidel. Before long the Venetians, far from turning Thessalonica into a second Venice as they had promised, were heartily regretting that they had ever accepted the Despot's offer which, they complained - since the Sultan was forcing them to pay an annual tribute - was costing them some 60,000 ducats a year. On the other hand, they still had their pride; and when Murad himself arrived on 26 March with an army estimated - surely with wild exaggeration -at one hundred and ninety thousand men to demand the immediate surrender of the city, he was answered with a hail of arrows.
On the following day the monks of the monastery of the Vlataion (which still stands just inside the northern walls) are said to have sent a message to the Sultan advising him to cut the pipes that brought water into the city. Whether or not they were actually guilty of such treachery we shall never know, though it seems extremely unlikely - and unlikelier still that he acted upon their advice. This time he was putting his trust in brute strength; he had collected and equipped a huge army, and he was determined to use it. The attack began at dawn on 29 March, Murad himself taking command of the units drawn up along the eastern section of the walls which seemed to him to be the weakest. For some three hours his catapults, mangonels and battering rams did their worst, while his archers loosed further volleys of arrows every time a defender showed himself above the bastion. Gradually the Thessalonians, realizing that the situation was hopeless, grew more and more discouraged; many of them deserted their posts; and soon after nine o'clock in the morning the Sultan's men managed to bring the first scaling-ladder into place against the wall. A moment later a Turkish soldier was up and over the parapet, triumphantly throwing the severed head of a Venetian guard down to his comrades below as a sign that they should follow.
