Episode 331 - The Last Hope

Popsicles, sprinklers, a cool breeze.

Talk about refreshing.

You know what else is refreshing this summer?

A brand new phone with Verizon.

Yep, get a new phone on any plan with Select Phone Trade In MyPlan.

And lock down a low price for three years on any plan with MyPlan.

This is a deal for everyone, whether you're a new or existing customer.

Swing by Verizon today for our best phone deals.

Three-year price guarantee applies to then current base monthly rate only.

Additional terms and conditions apply for all offers.

Lowe's knows you've got a job to do, and we help get it done.

With the My Lowe's Pro Rewards Program, eligible members save more with volume discounts on qualifying orders through a quote of $2,000 or more.

Join for free today.

Lowe's, we help you save.

Offer can't be combined with any other discount contract and or special pricing.

Exclusions, more terms, and restrictions apply.

Details at lowe's.com/slash terms.

Subject to change.

This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp.

Hello, everyone.

It can be tough finding someone to talk to these days.

For example, I work from home, alone, and I moved out of London where all my friends live.

Now I have to bother my neighbours or ask ChatGPT when I need some help.

Maybe you've turned to some funny places for support.

But not everyone is a therapist.

Not everyone is the one.

Find your right match with BetterHelp.

If you're in need of empathy, compassion and a real listening ear, there is nothing like therapy.

It can be priceless to carve out a space just for you, where you can get things off your chest and get your head to a happier place.

BetterHelp's online service can help you find the one you're looking for.

Fill in a questionnaire, and they'll match you with a therapist who'll be a good fit for your needs.

They have years of experience and an industry-leading match fulfilment rate.

And if they aren't the one for you, you can switch to a different therapist at any time at no extra cost.

As the largest online therapy provider in the world, BetterHelp can provide access to mental health professionals with a diverse variety of expertise.

Find the one with BetterHelp.

Our listeners get 10% off their first month at betterhelp.com/slash Byzantium.

That's better

H-E-L-P dot com slash Byzantium.

Byzantium

Hello everyone and welcome to the history of Byzantium episode 331 The Last Hope

Manuel Palaeolokos died in 1425 at the age of 75.

For a medieval person, that is a very long life.

And Manuel's was far richer than than most.

He travelled widely across Europe.

He met many famous people.

He fought, negotiated, and schemed.

He wrote a lot down.

And if you want to know more about the last Roman emperor that we can actually get to know, then check out our last episode on Patreon.

Stepping back into the narrative, what becomes clear is that very little had changed for Romania during Manuel's lifetime.

When he was born, the disastrous civil war was raging between his father John and his grandfather John Cantacusinos.

By the time Manuel was ten, the Roman Empire had been reduced to two major cities, one province, and a string of islands and forts.

As he breathed his last, Byzantium looked much the same.

A lifetime of struggle to improve the position of his people had largely come to naught.

And the reason why was simple.

In that same seventy-five-year period, the Ottomans had gone from holding northwest Anatolia and one European port to being masters of about 70% of both the Balkans and Anatolia.

Five years after Manuel was buried, the Turks stormed the walls of Thessaloniki and sacked the city.

John VIII Palaeologos was born in December 1392, the eldest son of Manuil and Helena Dragash.

When he was two, the Ottomans placed Constantinople under siege.

So unlike previous generations, he was under no illusions about the state of the empire he was destined to inherit.

He was crowned in his teens and worked closely with his father from his mid to late twenties.

John led the army onto the walls to fight off the Ottoman siege of 1422, the one where they used cannons for the first time.

Manawiel had a stroke shortly afterwards, so by the time his father died John had already been effective sole emperor for three years.

John knew that there was only one way he could save Byzantium, and that was to recruit a crusade which could defeat the Ottomans in battle in the Balkans.

The hope was that if the Latins could inflict just one notable defeat on the Turks, then the other Christian powers of the region would throw off the suzerainty of the Sultan.

John had already travelled west to ask for help in person.

He'd received no real assistance, but he had been told by King Sigismund of Hungary that he should become a Catholic.

John's grandfather had done just that, but it hadn't brought any significant aid.

There was one step which had not been taken, though, and that was full church union.

If Byzantium was seen by everyone in Western Europe as having come back into the fold, as being one of them, Perhaps that would help move hearts and minds in the direction of another crusade.

The fact that the King of Hungary was encouraging this idea was the most hopeful part of the equation.

The Hungarians would form the backbone of any crusading effort.

They were, after all, the only major land power who shared a border with the Turks.

John was ready to do whatever it took to get help, and this was the final card he had to play.

Of course, church union was not an easy thing to sell to the Roman people.

The specifics of Michael VIII's persecutions may have been forgotten, but Latin subjugation was very much a live issue for all Romans.

The ideal situation for the Emperor would be the opportunity to hold an ecumenical council, where the issues between the two sides could be debated.

Only then was there a chance that the Orthodox Church would accept some form of union with Rome.

The Latins had ruled this out in the past.

Since the Pope was head of the Church, what was there to debate?

Fortunately for John, the chaos of the 15th century papacy actually made some form of council a possibility.

The division between Rome and Avignon had ended by this point, but the reality of that schism created a legitimacy crisis within the papacy.

There were many in the church who wanted ecumenical councils to decide important matters rather than having to follow the whims of individual pontiffs.

A council had been called at Basel in 1431 to deal with conflicts within the Holy Roman Empire, as well as to discuss the rising threat of the Ottomans.

But during the course of its discussions, the sitting pope died.

A new pontiff was elected, but some members of the council refused to accept him.

This created space for Pope Eugenius IV to agree to an actual council where the Greeks could come and debate the issues which separated them from the Latins.

The Pope wanted to be the man who put this matter to bed rather than see his rivals in Basel undermine him.

Palaeologos seized the opportunity.

He spent several years in consultation with the patriarch and leading bishops over how to approach a possible union.

Orthodox objections to Latin doctrines were centuries old and he was not expecting the Pope to concede much, but there must be a way to negotiate a compromise.

The Romans were therefore well prepared when the call finally came.

Pope Eugenius invited them to join him at an ecumenical council to be held in the town of Ferrara in 1438.

Ferrara is to the north of Ravenna and Bologna.

Now some of you might be thinking, hang on, Robin, Manuel died in 1425, and here we are in 1438.

What happened to those 13 years?

Well, don't worry, we'll get to that.

In November 1437, the Emperor, his aging patriarch, Joseph II, and 700 compatriots boarded a papal fleet and sailed for Italy.

Yes, 700.

The Romans were treating this as a true ecumenical council and took as many clergy as they possibly could.

This meant about two dozen Roman bishops, including the patriarchs of Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem, all of whom lived in Constantinople and had no prospect of visiting their sees.

Representatives from Georgia, Wallachia and Russia were also present.

The Emperor wanted to try and bring as many of the Orthodox into this union as possible, to avoid the kind of splits that had undermined similar attempts in the past.

And all these bishops would bring teams of clergy with them, and their secretaries and servants, and so on.

The expenses of this very large contingent were going to be met by the papacy.

A great act of generosity, on the one hand, but also a potential source of friction.

If the Latins decided to withhold funds, the Orthodox would be at their mercy.

Antony Caldellis gives John great credit for how he handled the next two years.

The council began in Ferrara in the spring and deliberated for many months.

Plague then broke out and the entire council moved to Florence in early 1439 nine when Cossimo de Medici offered to pay for the remainder of the proceedings.

A conclusion was only reached in July of that year, and the Romans didn't reach home until early fourteen forty.

We can only imagine the stress the emperor was under having to manage seven hundred people for that entire period.

All the smartest men in the empire were at his side, disagreeing about every small point of detail and demanding that the Vasilevs help settle matters.

Cordellis says that even though John badly wanted union, he refused to humiliate himself or the Orthodox at any point.

He insisted on being received with the honour that his rank demanded, he prevented the patriarch from having to kiss the pope's foot, and though he nudged his side towards union, he kept pushing for a full discussion of each issue to satisfy his clergy.

Of course he was able to behave this way because Pope Eugenius wanted the negotiations to succeed.

A different pope would never have been so tolerant.

But we know from the Latin sources that the pontiff was nervous throughout that the Romans would get up and leave, undermining him in front of his enemies.

The fact that both sides sincerely debated the issues for eighteen months makes me a little sad.

Had such efforts taken place centuries earlier, it's possible that a lot of bloodshed could have been avoided.

Not to mention the Fourth Crusade.

The Romans were given a tour of Venice before they set off north to Ferrara, and because they could read the Greek inscriptions, they recognised all the pieces looted from Constantinople.

As for the actual discussions, most disputes were dealt with by each side tolerating the other's differences the use of leavened or unleavened bread, for example.

The innovative Latin doctrine of purgatory caused a long debate, as did the Byzantine promotion of hesychasm.

Again, both sides agreed to accept the other's peculiarities.

The Latins had more luck with the filioque, though, persuading the leading Orthodox representatives that there was evidence in the writing of the Church Fathers suggesting that the Holy Spirit could proceed from the Father and the Son.

Once this was accepted by a leading group of Byzantine bishops, that became the basis on which union could take place.

Papal supremacy was affirmed, quote, without prejudice to the rights of the Eastern Patriarchs, end quote, just the kind of vague wording that would keep the peace.

After 18 months, everyone was desperate to end the council and go home.

The Union was celebrated with a liturgy on the 6th of July 1439 in the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore, the famous Duomo that you can see in Florence today.

Despite this success, by the time John returned home things had soured.

The patriarch Joseph died shortly before the Union was agreed, so the church had no leader to keep everyone in line.

And one prominent bishop, Marcos Eugenikos, refused to sign the Union, while many others felt they had been coerced.

Once home, their lack of enthusiasm was communicated to the population of Constantinople.

The court didn't attempt any big celebrations of of union for fear of a reaction, and this encouraged Eugenikos to denounce the Latins as heretics and win a popular following.

Several clergymen began to recant, and the Russian Church refused to accept the Union.

Attempting to profit from this disquiet, John's younger brother Demetrius posed as the defender of Orthodoxy.

Recruiting an army of Turks, he blockaded Constantinople in 1442.

The blockade failed to hold though, and Demetrius was arrested.

And despite all this bad news, Pope Eugenius held up his end of the bargain.

Now that the Eastern Christians were under his authority again, he called for a crusade against the Turks who oppressed them, and eventually one did form.

And this really was the last chance for the Romans to break through the Ottoman stranglehold.

Now that we've reached this point, let's backtrack and bring you up to speed on the other events of John's reign.

So what were the Romans doing between Manuel's death in 1425 and the crusade being prepared in 1443?

Well, they were aggressively retaking territory and planning further expansion.

Wait, what?

I must have read that wrong.

Hang on, they were aggressively retaking territory and planning further.

Hmm.

This was of course down in the Peloponnese, where the Romans could attack the Latins rather than the Turks.

Manuel Palaeologos had sired eight sons, an unusually fruitful scenario in Byzantine history.

John was the eldest, and three other boys had died by the time Thessaloniki was sacked in 1430, but that still left four brothers for John to manage.

There was Theodore, who had been sent to govern the Peloponnese, there was Constantine, as in Constantine XI,

there was Demetrios, the troublemaker, and there was Thomas.

As you know, Palaeologan practice had been to install princes as the rulers of the various pieces of Byzantium which remained one in Thessaloniki, one in the Peloponnese, one at Constantinople, and so on.

Well, with Thessaloniki gone, and four brothers to satisfy, John allowed three of them to settle in the Peloponnese.

This gave them lands and retinues of their own, and kept them away from the Ottomans, who might try to suborn them, as then happened with Demetrius.

Even before his little rebellion, John had been suspicious of Demetrius.

He actually took him to Italy with him, since he couldn't be trusted at home.

This meant that Theodore, Constantine, and Thomas were all loose in Byzantium's only real province.

The result was that they annexed the entire region within a few years.

The Peloponnese was divided between Latin lords in the west and Romans in the east.

Constantine and his brothers began to attack the Latin holdings and found little resistance.

Latin lords could have been co-opted back in Cantacusinos' day, but the civil wars had left them in place.

Now they surrendered swiftly.

In 1427, Glarenza was taken.

In 1429, Patras fell.

In 1432, the last prince of Achaea died, and the Romans moved into Attica.

In each case, the Romans besieged their enemies, but then accepted some form of negotiated surrender.

In several cases, the Latins agreed to just become part of the Byzantine aristocracy, submitting to their new overlords to keep some of their wealth and marrying their relatives into the Roman hierarchy.

All of the Peloponnese, or the Morea, as it had become known, was now under Roman control.

The brothers now eyed Athens to the north.

The Catalans were long gone.

By this point, the city was held by a Florentine aristocrat who wisely paid homage to the sultan in order to keep his lands.

This expansion in Greece also makes me a little sad.

Had Cantacusinos fallen on his sword back in the day, it's entirely possible that John Palaeologos would have reunited Greece under Roman rule, and that Byzantium could have prevented the Ottomans from settling so comfortably in Europe.

Even the elimination of these Latin lords was not done by a band of happy brothers.

Though they worked together on occasion, this was a land grab grab led by individuals who then fell out over bits of territory and nearly fought a pitched battle with one another.

As Antony Caldellus notes, Palaeologan infighting continued to the very end.

Meanwhile, with their long civil war behind them, the Ottomans were back on the war path.

Western Anatolia was brought to heel, though the Beylik of Caraman in the east remained hostile.

While in Europe the capture of Thessaloniki allowed them to move their marcher lords further west and north.

They began to raid Albania, as in the lands between Epirus in northern Greece and Dirachium further up the coast, fighting in the mountains and besieging strongholds.

To the north, Sultan Murad made peace with the Serbian lord George Brankovic, marrying his sister and making the Serb his vassal.

This allowed Ottoman troops to move through his lands and begin to raid those just south of the Danube.

During these campaigns the Turks crossed the river, entered Hungary and raided Transylvania.

The goal was to destabilize the Hungarians so that they wouldn't intervene when the Ottomans attacked Belgrade two years later.

The siege of Belgrade failed, however, and the lord of Transylvania, Yanko Hunyadi, twice defeated Turkish raids into his territory.

He was able to use the new tactic of creating a mobile fortress out of wagons from which which crossbows and artillery pieces could fire at the approaching Turkish cavalry.

The second of those raids came in 1441, just as Pope Eugenius was calling for a crusade.

This venture did not produce the same enthusiasm which had been aroused fifty years earlier, when a large force of French knights and Hungarian infantry had been annihilated outside of Nicopolis, but enough people were interested to give the Romans hope.

The Hungarians would again provide the core of any assembled force, and they were joined by the northern Serbs and a contingent from Wallachia, while the Duke of Burgundy, keen to gain crusading credentials, volunteered to fight.

He promised some ships, as did the Pope and the Venetians.

Timing was everything in an endeavor like this, and three revolts against Ottoman rule were brewing at the same time.

A chief who came to be known as Skandabeg was fomenting a rebellion in the mountains of Albania, while Constantine Palaeologos had put enough pressure on the Duke of Athens that he'd stopped paying tribute to the Sultan and paid it to Byzantium instead.

Most promisingly of all, the Emir of Karaman was massing his men for an attack on Western Anatolia.

The trick was going to be to align these attacks to do maximum damage to the Sultan,

though that was no easy matter.

The Crusader plan was similar to the one which had failed half a century before.

The Allied army would cross the Danube and move slowly down the river towards Nicopolis.

They would meet the Sultan somewhere nearby and defeat him in battle.

Meanwhile, the Venetian-led fleet would patrol the straits to stop the Turks from bringing any reinforcements from Anatolia.

If all went well, the Balkans would erupt into rebellion, and the Ottomans would have too many fires to put out to regain control.

Things did not go according to plan, though.

In spring 1443, the Emir of Karaman attacked Ottoman positions on the western plateau.

The Crusaders were not yet ready, which allowed Murad to cross from Europe to Asia to deal with his Muslim rival, shut down the invasion, and get back to the Balkans by the time the Hungarians set off in July.

The Crusaders made good progress initially.

Yanko Hunyadi led the army as it smashed through the Ottoman garrisons of northern Serbia.

He captured both Nish and Sofia before the weather began to turn.

Hunyadi withdrew to the Danube, but sent ambassadors to Adrianople to discuss terms with the Sultan.

Murad was alarmed and offered the Hungarians a ten-year truce, which they accepted.

The Hungarians were in this for their own security, not that of Constantinople.

The peace treaty which followed liberated the northern Serbs from direct Turkish rule, but they were to remain the Sultan's vassals.

Murad then made the extraordinary decision to abdicate in favour of his twelve-year-old son, Mehmet,

as in Mehmet the Conqueror.

We can't reconstruct Murad's logic.

He was only about 40 years old.

The only clues we have are that his eldest son had just died, and that he seems to have been sincere about retiring.

He was unaware, though, that the crusade was still in motion.

The Allied fleet had finally assembled and was getting ready to sail for spring fourteen forty four.

The Hungarians were persuaded to renege on their treaty and attempt to take advantage of the confusion which the Sultan's abdication would inevitably cause.

This involved absolving the Hungarian king from oaths he had just sworn to the Muslim envoys, so as ever, crusading was filled with hypocrisy and lies.

In late summer 1444, King Ladislaus and John Hunyadi led the Hungarian army into the Balkans and marched all the way to Varna on the Black Sea coast of Bulgaria It was a destructive march, but crucially, the northern Serbs under George Brankovic refused to come with them.

The peace treaty had restored him to his ancestral lands, so he stayed loyal to the Sultan.

At Adrianople the Ottoman court panicked and recalled Murad to lead them.

He left his Anatolian retirement and made for the coast.

But the Christian fleet now blocked the Hellespont.

He rushed north and found a crossing at the Bosphorus, where the Byzantines were unable to stop him.

The Sultan set up guns on the Asian shore to fire on their ships and may have bribed some Genoese sailors to help him cross over.

It was a crucial moment.

With the Sultan back in the field, the Ottoman forces gathered and comfortably outnumbered the Hungarians.

The two sides met on the tenth of November outside Varna.

The Hungarians put their faith in God and their artillery.

Their mobile wagons were effective at driving the Turkish cavalry away, but in the hand to hand fighting which followed, King Ladislaus was unhorsed and killed by the Janissaries.

The Christians routed, and many were slaughtered.

The Ottomans killed all their leaders, except for Yanko Hunyadi, who got away.

The Turks had suffered heavy losses too, but once again their commitment to relentless recruitment had paid dividends.

News of this defeat was greeted with despair in Constantinople.

It also provided fuel for the anti Unionists who felt it was punishment for their sovereign's capitulation to Rome.

The action wasn't quite over.

The rebellions in Albania and Greece were under way, and the indefatigable Janko Hunyadi wanted to continue the fight.

The future Constantine XI had gone ahead and annexed Athens under the cover of the crusade.

He was now left to face the full wrath of the Ottoman army.

In 1446 the Sultan overran Attica in person and restored its Latin ruler.

The Turks then used their artillery to smash the Roman wall across the Isthmus of Corinth.

The Sultan split his army in two and unleashed a devastating raid through the Peloponnese.

Thousands of Romans were led away to slavery, and Constantine and his brothers agreed to become the Sultan's vassals.

Two years later, the Sultan entered Albania to put down the rebellion there, though he was interrupted by the news that Janko Hunyadi had crossed the Danube with another Hungarian army.

The two sides met on the plain of Kosovo, the same place where the Ottomans had won a famous victory sixty years earlier.

Hunyadi had brought his Wallachian allies and hoped that the Albanians would cause trouble in the Sultan's rear, but it was not to be.

The Wallachians abandoned him, and Hunyadi had to flee after a two-day battle.

Murad returned to Albania, where he bottled Skanderbeg up in his mountain fortress and rearranged his vassal rulers in Greece to ensure their loyalty.

The The Sultan passed away in early 1451.

He was unable to enjoy the peaceful retirement he'd hoped for, but he could rest knowing that the Ottoman Empire was unlikely to face a serious threat for another generation.

The Romans were now at the mercy of the Ottomans.

Their last hope had faded.

Correspondence between Constantinople and Western Europe began to slow.

Manuel Palaolokos had spent his life sending out a constant stream of letters, a decades-long attempt to stoke the fires of crusading spirit, but now his son realized that the embers had truly gone out.

All he could do was to sign another treaty with the Venetians, the only ally who could easily reach him and who was similarly motivated to prevent the Ottomans from annexing the entire region.

John died on the 31st of October 1448.

He was fifty-six years old and had been sole emperor for twenty-six years.

He was buried in the Pantocrato monastery with his father.

He was the last Roman emperor to receive a formal burial.

Ladies and gentlemen, we have come to the end of the road.

Our new emperor will be Constantine

Our new sultan will be Mehmet II.

There is only one story left to tell.

I will leave a dramatic pause next week,

and in two weeks' time I will see you again for the final siege of Constantinople.

Popsicles, sprinklers, a cool breeze.

Talk about refreshing.

You know what else is refreshing this summer?

A brand new phone with Verizon.

Yep, get a new phone on any plan with Select Phone Trade In MyPlan.

And lock down a low price for three years on any plan with MyPlan.

This is a deal for everyone, whether you're a new or existing customer.

Swing by Verizon today for our best phone deals.

Three-year price guarantee applies to then-current base monthly rate only.

Additional terms and conditions apply for all offers.

If you thought goldenly breaded McDonald's chicken couldn't get more golden, think golden.

Because new sweet and smoky special edition gold sauce is here.

Made for your chicken favorites.

At Participating McDonald's for a limited time.