Episode 329 - Buying Time

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Please play responsibly.

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Hallo, everyone, and welcome to the History of Byzantium, episode three hundred and twenty nine Buying Time

Last time Manuel Palaeologos became emperor and refused to answer a summons from his overlord, the Ottoman Sultan.

The Vasilevs was tired of living in fear.

The Sultan, Bayezit, did not respond with a hot head.

Instead he set up an effective blockade of Constantinople and settled in to starve the Romans out.

The siege lasted for eight years and would surely have succeeded without divine intervention.

Improbably, the city was saved by the post-Mongol warlord Timur.

In a strange replay of the Battle of Manzikerd, the rising power of Iran clashed with the Empire of Anatolia, delivering the same crushing result.

Bayezid was captured alive, and a disastrous civil war would tear the Ottomans apart just as the Romans had experienced two hundred years earlier.

The arrival of Timur really was a godsend for the Romans.

Not only did he defeat the Ottomans in battle, but he undid all the work of Bayezit's campaigns in Asia.

After his victory, Timur travelled around Anatolia, restoring all the Beyliks which the Ottomans had subordinated, confining the sultans to their original stomping grounds in Bithynia.

Allegedly, he had Bayezid carried around in an iron cage until the unhappy sultan died in early 1403.

Bayezid had sired at least twelve sons, and they would spend the next twenty years murdering one another until only one remained.

The Romans really couldn't have asked for more.

Timor left Anatolia the following year and was kind enough to die in 1405, ruling out the possibility that he would return to conquer Constantinople as well.

Manuel Palaeologos was in Paris when the amazing news arrived.

Everyone was overjoyed and relieved.

A great Christian city had been saved, the emperor could return home, and the French didn't have to give him any more money.

Back in Constantinople, though, there was work to be done.

Bayezitz's eldest son Suleiman had fled from the battlefield of Ankara and crossed over to Gallipoli.

What saved the Ottoman Empire from collapse was their Balkan provinces.

Untouched by the war in Asia, it was the armies here, which slowly restored order and would eventually retake all of Anatolia.

That was a long way in the future, though.

Suleiman had his brothers to contend with.

He needed to do some serious politicking to ensure he had the support necessary to emerge victorious.

There was considerable fear amongst the Ottoman high command that if a crusade formed in the next few years, the Turkish project in Europe could be wiped out.

To ensure that this didn't happen, Suleiman invited all the Christian powers of the region to come to Gallipoli for peace talks.

In exchange for recognizing him as sultan, Suleiman was prepared to dish out the prizes.

The Genoese and Venetians would receive trade concessions, the Knights Hospitala would be left in peace, and as for the Romans, well, since they held the crossing point between Europe and Asia, which would likely determine the course of the coming civil war, they got everything they wanted.

Thessaloniki was returned with significant territory to its east and west.

The coastlands of Thrace were handed back, as were three Aegean islands.

Even a strip of territory in Asia, running towards Nicomedia, was gifted to them.

Prisoners were returned, and Suleiman even reversed the honorary position of vassalage, signing a treaty in which he referred to Manuel as his father.

It was a stunning result for the Romans, giving them valuable revenue and real hope that they could, after all, recover from such a low ebb.

It was, though, an even better result for the Ottomans.

The Christian powers were more than satisfied and left the Turks to it.

Only Manuel kept pressing for an alliance against them, but it was not to be.

Suleiman was more than happy to show intense humility in exchange for a peace that would lead him to the ultimate prize, and he calculated correctly that even with all these concessions, the Romans would be no match for his armies.

Manuil returned home in June 1403, and to his credit, his nephew John VII stepped aside.

The junior emperor was given Thessaloniki to rule, and at this stage remained the heir to the throne.

Manuil now had three major goals.

One, to prolong the Ottoman civil war for as long as possible, two, to ensure the succession of his offspring.

And 3.

To improve the Roman position as much as he could before the next showdown with the Turks, whenever that might be.

Goals 1 and 2 went pretty well, all things considered.

Number 3 did not.

Let's deal with each in turn.

The Ottoman Civil War essentially rumbled on for 20 years.

Manawil proved adept at backing the right horse at the right time to keep things bloody.

The initial contest was between Suleiman in the Balkans and his brother Mehmet in Anatolia.

Since the Romans were trapped in the middle, the Emperor had to offer or deny support to each side when it came time to fight.

He helped Suleiman cross to Asia in 1403, where the Sultan captured Bursa and pushed his brother's forces back to Ankara.

But Mehmet allied himself with his younger brother Musa and sent him to the Balkans.

There Musa made an alliance with the Wallachians from across the Danube and went raiding south.

So Manuel ferried Suleiman back to the Balkans in 1410, where he was killed by Musa.

Musa, angry at the Romans for aiding his brother, attacked them, burning villages in Thrace and using his navy to attack Byzantine ships.

He began to re-establish Bayezit's blockade of Constantinople.

Only this time, Manuel was ready for him.

The city was well stocked with supplies, and Roman ships even ambushed the Ottoman fleet when it entered the Bosphorus.

Meanwhile, the Vasilevs was hastily making contact with Mehmet in Asia.

Since only one man could be the Sultan, the alliance between Musa and Mehmet had always been a temporary one.

Mehmet's army was transported across the Bosphorus in 1412 and was initially defeated by Musa's forces.

The Romans helped Mehmet regroup, and he defeated and killed his brother the following year near Sophia.

This could have been the end of the civil war, since Mehmed now faced no serious rivals and was willing to honor Suleiman's deal with the Romans.

But allowing the Ottomans to coalesce under one sultan was the last thing that Manuil wanted.

So Manawil released Suleiman's son, Orhan, who had been staying at Constantinople, in the hopes that he could reignite the civil war.

He couldn't, but to the emperor's delight, someone else did.

A man appeared in 1414 at Trebizond, claiming to be Mustafa, another son of Bayezid, who disappeared after the Battle of Ankara twelve years earlier.

He may have been a chancer, but that was enough for the Wallachians to give him an army and for him to go raiding through Bulgaria in fourteen sixteen.

Though he was defeated and fled to Thessaloniki, the invasion helped spark two further rebellions against Ottoman rule.

One was in the Dobrugia, the area Mustafa had just raided, and the other in Anatolia, near Chios.

The leaders of these rebellions were both clerics, who seem to have been influenced by popular religious movements in both the Muslim and Christian worlds.

The sources we have for them suggest that they were speaking to the dispossessed, promising to bring God's true justice to the world, a world which may soon end.

The most fascinating part of their preaching were calls for the equality of Muslims and Christians and the common ownership of property.

What scholars like Heath Lowry suggest is that here we get a glimpse of life on the ground in this frontier society.

Islam was always promoted by the reigning dynasty, and a class of educated Islamic scholars had been imported, but the mass of ordinary people were largely Christian.

During this same period a preacher in a mosque at Bursa stood up and announced that Jesus was no less a prophet than Muhammad, and when this was challenged, the locals supported the view of the preacher.

It seems likely that the weight of the Christian element in Ottoman society was encouraging a movement towards syncretism.

Could Islam and Christianity be combined, or equalized somehow, to smooth the transition of Romans into an Ottoman society?

Popular religious movements often grow in the countryside, away from the orthodoxies of cities, and the rebellions of this period seemed to have developed where open-minded Muslim preachers reached out to their Christian constituents as part of a genuine desire for unity and justice.

Needless to say, both rebellions were crushed, but the warnings they carried were noted by the Ottoman court.

The development of the Janissaries seemed to have been turbocharged by these movements.

With Christians increasing their numbers within the Ottoman army, something had to be done to expand the Muslim element, if syncretism was to be halted.

And so Christian boys were taken and sent to live with loyal families in Anatolia, so that they could be religiously Islamicized, linguistically Turkified, and culturally Ottomanized, in the words of Lowry.

These men would surround the Sultan, preventing him from losing touch with his roots as as he spent more and more time in Christian lands.

While all this was going on, the Venetians destroyed the Ottoman fleet near the Hellespont.

The Italians had tried to find a diplomatic solution to increased Turkish raids into the Aegean, but when that failed, they took action.

This made the contenders for the throne even more dependent on Byzantine aid, at least for now.

Mehmet would spend the rest of his reign trying to reassert authority in Anatolia, having finally secured the Balkans, giving the Romans much needed time to work on their other two goals.

Goal number two was to ensure the succession of Manuel's family.

His nephew John VII conveniently passed away from natural causes in 1408, with no surviving son.

This meant that Manuel's branch of the Palaeologan family would now rule until fourteen fifty three.

The emperor's much loved brother, Theodore, died around this time too, and so Manuel sailed first to the Peloponnese and then to Thessaloniki to install his young sons in power.

Eleven year old Theodorus took charge of Greece and eight year old Andronicus went to the Empire's second city.

Obviously Manuel's ministers would actually rule until the boys came of age.

This had become the Palaeologan system of government.

Each piece of Byzantium needed an emperor present to maintain loyalty, and since Palaeologan princes always seemed to fall out, it was best they be separated early.

Manuel was lucky in this regard.

He'd waited until his forties to get married, but still produced ten children that we know of, including eight sons.

And by living well into his seventies he gave his offspring time to mature.

Thanks to the Turkish civil war, Manuil was able to spend several months with each of his boys before saying goodbye, and he would return to the Peloponnese in 1415 and stay for a year.

His goal on this occasion was to build a wall across the Isthmus of Corinth.

This had been a natural defensive position going all the way back to the Athenian Spartan War with Persia.

The last major work done on its defences was by Justinian, and so Manuil built on top of his predecessors' foundations.

It took a month to erect the wall and many towers.

But their construction gets us into goal number three, improving the Roman position as much as possible while the Turks were distracted.

Both Constantinople and Thessaloniki had impressive defences which the Ottomans couldn't easily breach, and so Palaeologus was trying to give the Peloponnese the same bulwark.

Unfortunately, this project exposed the fault lines in Byzantine society.

In order to build the wall, Manuel had to levy a special tax on the rich, and forced the poor to come and build it.

This was a traditional method of imperial fundraising.

The peasants would pay part of their taxes in the form of manual labor.

Despite the obvious benefit which the wall provided, the project was bitterly resented, so much so that a group of local notables organized a rebellion.

The Emperor led his troops in and put them down, sending the ringleaders to Constantinople, but you may now have spotted a pattern.

First at Thessaloniki, when Manuel ruled alone, then at Constantinople during the long siege, and now here,

the Roman elites avoided paying tax and showed no enthusiasm for collective defence.

Manuel was constantly frustrated by what he saw as a lack of patriotism.

The truth was that the dynamics which had made the Empire such a success no longer functioned.

As you know, the key to Constantinople's power over the past millennium was its ability to get the elites to invest in state service.

The huge salaries which the court offered kept everyone in line, kept them coming back, offering to be generals, governors, and bureaucrats, knowing that once they received a court salary, their family could be set for life, and possibly for generations.

Since the Empire had lost lost all its territory to the Serbs and Turks, the government could no longer offer such salaries, nor did the Empire possess enough land to make its elites rich in their traditional role as landowners.

So those who still had money invested in commerce instead.

After generations of snobbery about those who traded for a living, the Byzantine elite joined them.

It was the only avenue open to them, and there was plenty of profit to be made.

Constantinople remained an excellent entrepot for trade.

Not only its geographical position, which dominated multiple trade routes, but the division of the surrounding region, into Genoese, Venetian, and Turkish spheres of influence, gave traders lots of options to work with.

The Roman elites became grain merchants and fishmongers, they became bankers, investing in the Italian trade networks, or they went into debt, taking Genoese money to try and launch new businesses.

State service for the Roman government was now an opportunity to make contacts with important men and further your business interests.

This put the elites of Byzantium at odds with their own government.

The interests of the two sides no longer fully coincided.

We saw this at Thessaloniki during Manuil's time there.

The aristocracy were in favour of surrendering to the Turks on favourable terms, since that was best for business.

Manuel tried to warn them that the Turks would not be as tolerant as they imagined, but could not persuade them.

As private business owners, rather than state servants, the elites no longer wanted a strong government.

As Antony Caldelles puts it, they resented its impositions.

Their money was safer in the hands of Italian bankers.

Increasingly, rich Romans sought Italian citizenship.

This would exempt them from Roman taxes, allow them to do more business abroad, and provide an escape hatch in the event of an Ottoman takeover.

Manuel despaired of all this.

If he had more money, he could provide a better defence, but the elites hid their money from him.

In the short term, the nobility were acting in their best interests, but in the long run the Ottomans would create a government every bit as centralized and demanding as the Romans had ever been, and the sultan would not view them as his people, as the Vasileft did.

At the other end of the social scale, poverty was increasingly visible on the streets of Constantinople.

The small farmers of Thrace kept having their lands ruined by the Turks, while others had become homeless and loitered around the Golden Horn looking for work.

There had always been rich and poor in Byzantium, but now the contrast was starker than ever.

Sermons and satires from this period regularly bemoaned the fate of ordinary Romans and criticised the wealthy.

The skyline of Constantinople was changing as well.

The super rich were building tall towers on top of their mansions in direct imitation of their Italian trading partners.

To try and fight their evasion, Manuel levied a tax on Venetian wine consumed at the capital.

Naturally the Italians complained loudly and shut the doors of several taverns, but the Emperor accused the Italians of abetting those who were trying to dodge his tax collectors.

How else was he supposed to pay the soldiers who manned the walls, the walls that protected Venetian property?

This new attitude amongst the elites made it impossible for the Roman Empire to recover.

An aristocratic philosopher known as Plethon wrote a treatise arguing for the reorganization of the Peloponnese in order to save it from the Turks.

He proposed that land be redistributed to reduce inequality and to support a citizen army, one who would stand and fight to defend their homes.

He was arguing for a return to something like the theme system as it was originally envisioned, but he also argued that foreign trade must be severely curtailed because he could see that it was warping the priorities of the rich who in the past would have put the common good above their profits.

I imagine many listeners to this podcast will wonder why no emperor had suggested a return to the themes during the past century, but to enforce such a system would have required a rich and powerful emperor who the elites feared, and that just wasn't the case anymore.

Increasingly, the wealthy shared a common outlook with the Venetians and Genoese, who were studiously indifferent to the fate of Romania.

Their self-serving attitude was on full display as Manuel built his wall across the Isthmus.

These defences not only increased security for the local Romans, but also for the Venetian ports of Methoni and Coroni, which had been taken after the Fourth Crusade.

The Italians thanked the Emperor for his industry, but when he suggested that they might want to contribute something towards the common defence, they refused.

On top of all this, the Black Death would break out again every ten or fifteen years.

The Empire was made up entirely of port cities now.

There was no way to avoid it.

Manuel then had achieved all he reasonably could in the nineteen years between Timur's victory at Ankara and the death of Mehmet in 1421.

The demise of the Sultan opened the possibility that there might be another Ottoman civil war to exploit.

When the new Sultan Murad II took back the lands in Asia which had been gifted to Byzantium, Manuel moved against him.

He released Mustafa, the son of Bayezit, who the Romans had been keeping under house arrest at Thessaloniki.

Mustafa was given money and an escort to get him to Gallipoli.

From there he advanced to Adrianople and convinced the governor to back him.

All seemed to be going well for the Roman potstirrers until the following spring.

Mustafa crossed to Asia, was abandoned by his troops, and was hunted down by the Sultan's executioners.

By June 1422, Murad had brought an army to the gates of Constantinople.

The Sultan planned on putting an end to the Roman Empire once and for all.

Unlike his grandfather, he would not blockade the city, but take it by force.

He ordered his men to dig long earthworks a couple of hundred meters from the land walls and set up camp behind it.

On top of this he placed his artillery, not just catapults and trebuchets, but for the first time on Roman soil, cannons.

The Turks targeted the area between the Romanos and Chirisius gates, the only place in the defences where the land dips significantly, allowing the besiegers to fire down on the besieged.

By August, the attack was launched.

The Ottomans had filled in sections of the moat and had siege towers ready to be rolled into place, while cannons bombarded the towers in the outer walls.

It It was all to no avail, though.

The Theodosian walls held firm.

In the end, the Sultan ordered a direct assault.

His archers launched relentless volleys towards the battlements, while his infantry rushed forward with ladders.

The Roman garrison pelted them with rocks and other missiles.

According to an eyewitness, priests, civilians, and women all worked together to keep the soldiers supplied with water and weapons.

Manuel's heir, John VIII, was present, leading the army, and by the end of the day a thousand Turks were dead, and the Romans cheered from their battlements, giving thanks to the Virgin.

Meanwhile, Manuel made contact with the sultan's brother, also named Mustafa, who was in Anatolia.

He sent him what aid he could, and managed to provoke another rebellion.

Infuriated by this, Murad ordered his siege to be lifted in September, and crossed back to Asia to deal with his sibling.

He would eventually kill him, but various vassals in Anatolia and the Balkans used the opportunity to stir up trouble which kept the sultan occupied for the time being.

The Romans had managed to worm their way out of another siege, but their luck was running out.

In addition to his attack on the Theodosian walls, Morad had ordered his armies to assault Thessaloniki and the Peloponnese.

Both attacks did tremendous damage.

Manuel's wall across the Isthmus of Corinth was breached, and the raiders tore through the Roman countryside, while Thessaloniki was blockaded as it had been under Manuel's watch forty years earlier.

This time, resistance crumbled swiftly.

Prince Andronicus wrote to his father to ask permission to hand the city over to the Venetians.

The Italians had avoided such entanglements until now, but perhaps tempted by the size and prestige of the city, the Senate voted ninety-nine to forty-five in favour of the proposal.

A Venetian garrison moved in and took over the functions of the Byzantine state, including paying salaries to the locals.

The costs of defending Thessaloniki soon proved far greater than the benefits.

The Italians held the city for the next seven years, but tensions with the native population ran high.

The Venetian garrison were accused of various abuses of power, the Orthodox Church had some of its rights curtailed, and inevitably the Venetians cut salaries and tried to move in on local commercial activity.

It was a disaster waiting to happen.

The Venetians brought all the downsides of Latin rule to a city which had been told that this was their only hope of salvation.

Romans who could fled, exacerbating the financial situation, and all the while Turkish troops patrolled the countryside.

The Venetian governor tried to resign, but no one volunteered to replace him.

By 1430, the defences had become inadequate, and the Sultan ordered his men in.

On the 29th of March, troops scaled the eastern walls and sacked the city.

The Thessalonians would have been better served by surrender.

Now they were killed or enslaved, and their property taken.

The second city of the Romans was gone forever.

Back at Constantinople, the court were becoming desperate.

Manuel suffered a severe stroke in 1422, leaving his son John as sole emperor.

With no options left, he followed in the footsteps of his father and grandfather and travelled to Western Europe to beg for aid.

He left in November 1423 and returned a year later.

He visited Venice, Milan, and Hungary, but received no help, just a lecture from King Sigismund on the need to rejoin the Catholic Church.

Soon after his return, the Romans offered peace terms to Murad.

All the gains of the post-Timo settlement were stripped away.

The Byzantine Empire was reduced once more to Constantinople, the Peloponnese, a couple of islands, and a couple of forts in Thrace.

The emperor would become the Sultan's vassal once more, paying him twenty one thousand gold coins a year for the privilege.

The work of Manuel's life had been slowly unravelled.

Fittingly he died the following year on the 21st of July 1425.

He was seventy-five years old and had ruled as sole emperor for thirty one years.

Manuel Palaolocos would have made a good emperor in better times.

He was an intelligent, disciplined man who worked hard to improve the position of his state, but with so little support from his own elites and such an unfavourable international position, there wasn't much more he could have done.

The miracle of Timor's attack at least saved him from having to surrender Constantinople to the enemy, but as he lay dying, he probably knew he had merely passed that fate on to the next generation.

manuel did leave an impression on the wider world though his travels through europe caused a stir as did some of the gifts he left its leaders thanks to his voluminous writing he also leaves us with a much better understanding of a roman emperor in an age of decline in fact it is the last life story of a roman leader that we have

so in our next episode i will take you through manuel's life story, examining his writing for the insights it leaves us, and taking you on his famous journey to Europe, where he became the first Roman emperor to visit Paris and London for a thousand years.

Since this is not technically part of our narrative, this episode will be for patrons only, as in those subscribed to the highest pledge level at patreon.com forward slash history of Byzantium.

I'm incredibly grateful to all of you for your support, and I hope you will enjoy the episode.

And if you'd like to sign up, then for just $6, you get access to all of the 21 bonus episodes I've produced over the years, along with a podcast feed with no adverts.

There's no minimum commitment, you can unsubscribe or resubscribe anytime you like.

In two weeks, then, we will return to Manuel's son, John VIII, as he faces up to the perennial challenge of his age, and he will conclude that the only way to get Western help is to go the whole hog and force through church union.

Coach, the energy out there felt different.

What changed for the team today?

It was the new game day scratches from the California Lottery.

Play is everything.

Those games sent the team's energy through the roof.

Are you saying it was the off-field play that made the difference on the field?

Hey, a little play makes your day, and today it made the game.

That's all for now.

Coach, one more question.

Play the new Los Angeles Chargers, San Francisco 49ers, and Los Angeles Rams Scratchers from the California Lottery.

A little play can make your day.

Please play responsibly.

Must be 18 years or older to purchase, play, or claim.

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