Episode 327 - Vassals and Pawns

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Hello everyone and welcome to the history of Byzantium episode 327

Vassals and Pawns

It's been a couple of episodes since we were with John Palaeologos, so let's just recap

Born in 1332, John was the eldest son of Andronicus III, the active and energetic emperor who led the Byzantines to their last hurrah.

The nine-year-old John would have been aware that the Roman world was under threat, but he'd have also had a sense of hope for the future.

That hope slowly drained away as he moved from boyhood to manhood.

His mother fell out with his father's best friend, John Cantacuzinos, and a ruinous civil war followed.

Palaeologos showed initiative in forcing his father-in-law into retirement, but once he was in sole charge of the empire he realized that his inheritance had been fritted away.

Macedonia surrendered to the Serbs, Thrace surrendered to the Turks, the islands surrendered to the Genoese.

John is criticised in some modern histories for his response.

Instead of fighting on the ground in the Balkans, he left for the West and begged for aid.

But John was not wrong in seeing Latin knights as the only real hope of defeating the Turks.

There was little he could do to forge an Orthodox alliance in the Balkans.

I mean if the Serbians couldn't work with one another, why would they listen to a Roman emperor with no army?

There was interest in the West for a crusade against the Turks, but the various Latin powers could not work together either.

Had the Genoese and Venetians been allies, the Turks might have been swept from the Aegean, but their deep-seated rivalry made any such project a non-starter.

John returned to Constantinople in 1371 to even more depressing news: that the Turks had crushed a Serbian army near Adrianople.

There was now nothing to stop the Turks from annexing Thrace as a new province and pushing their armies deeper into the Balkans.

It was only a matter of time before they turned around and put an end to the independence of Constantinople itself.

John did not immediately offer to become the Sultan's vassal, as many of the Serb lords did after that battle.

In fact, attempts were being made to increase the fighting capacity of the tiny Roman army.

Both the emperor and his son Manuel, who was in charge of Thessaloniki, confiscated property from the church and turned them into Pronoia land for soldiers.

In both cases, the church objected strenuously, which had always been church policy, but they didn't offer any alternative means for financing the army.

Manuil had actually captured the key fortress town of Seres shortly after the Serbian defeat, giving Thessaloniki a little breathing space in its quest for survival.

Unfortunately, our sources for this period lack detail and were written much later, after Manuil had succeeded his father as emperor.

The road to vassalage runs through the conflict between John's sons, who are crudely portrayed as the dutiful second son Manuel and the conniving eldest son Andronicus.

The reality was more complicated, but we don't have the sources to get closer to it.

You may remember from three episodes ago that when John was away in the West, he left his son Andronicus in charge of Constantinople, and on each occasion, when he was stranded, first in Hungary and then in Venice, it is said that his firstborn did little to help him, whereas Manuel, over at Thessaloniki, sailed to Italy to rescue his father.

One clue as to the tension between father and son is their age difference.

John fathered Andronicus when he was only sixteen years old, and so the twenty-three-year-old son was perhaps more competitive with the thirty-nine-year-old emperor than would normally have been the case.

But that is pure pop psychology.

More pertinent was just how weak the empire had become.

It invited men to try and seize power for themselves.

We have already seen Andronicus III overthrow his grandfather, Cantacusinos do the same to John, and then John turned the tables on him.

On each occasion, the men in question broke into Constantinople.

The same will happen multiple times across this episode.

It seems that the state no longer employed enough men to properly garrison the city, or paid them too little to ensure their loyalty.

After John returned to the capital, he arrested some of the men in his son's inner circle, but left Andronicus in situ.

Two years later though, father and son came to blows.

Allegedly Andronicus was conspiring against his father with a band of Turks in Thrace.

To give you an idea of how bad our sources are, we're told that John had his son and his son's six-year-old son blinded and imprisoned.

But that John didn't want to go the whole hog and actually blind them, so he'd just taken one of his sons' eyes and made his grandson squint.

Later on in the histories, both men seem to have miraculously regained their sight, with a later writer claiming that John had blinded them with hot vinegar, which, though painfully scolding their eyes, gave them the chance to make a full recovery.

Who knows?

Manuel, the second son, was called up from Thessaloniki and invested with the position of heir.

The pressing political issue of the day was the fate of Tenedos, the Roman island just off the Hellespont.

This is what John had been trying to sell to the Venetians in exchange for a forgiveness of debts.

Negotiations had continued at Constantinople, and by 1376 a deal seemed to be in place.

But this angered the Genoese, who did not want a Venetian outpost on the edge of the Sea of Marmora.

So that summer Genoese agents helped the maybe blind, probably not blind, Andronicus escape his confinement.

The prince slipped over the Golden Horn to Galata and sent word to the Ottoman Sultan Murad.

He wanted Turkish backing for an attempt on the Byzantine throne.

In another depressing episode in the never-ending Palaeologan civil war cycle, Andronicus offered Tenedos to the Genoese and Gallipoli to the Turks if they would help him break back into Constantinople.

This was straight from the Cantacusinos playbook.

Roman control of Gallipoli was one of the only things holding the Turks back, and handed over just to spite your father.

Well, it hasn't left Andronicus with much of a historical reputation.

The Turks sent troops, and the Genoese lent him money and ships, and in mid-August, he broke into the city and fought his way to the palace.

John and Manuel were thrown into prison, and Andronicus the Fourth became sole emperor.

He also crowned his young son as John VII.

I know it can be difficult to keep track of the Johns.

John V is John Palaeologos, John the Sixth is John Cantacusinos, John the Seventh is John Palaiologos's grandson, as in Andronicus's son.

Andronicus now became a Turkish vassal.

That isn't the right term.

We don't know precisely what the Sultan called his subordinate allies at this stage, but it's the terminology used in all the academic literature.

So we'll go with that.

Essentially he agreed to follow the orders of the Sultan within reason and to protect Ottoman interests in his own realm.

In return the Sultan offered to fight against Roman enemies, but that was little comfort at this point, since the Turks surrounded most of what was left of Byzantium.

This decision safeguarded Constantinople from immediate attack, but that wasn't a pressing concern at this moment.

The Turks were too focused on their frontier society to go through the logistical headaches of besieging New Rome, so Andronicus didn't really gain any tangible benefit for the state, just for himself.

This subservience required the Emperor to kneel before the Sultan, to join his retinue on campaign, and to follow orders while there.

It was yet another humiliation for the Romans on their journey to the bottom.

The Vasilevs paid an annual tribute for this honour and had to guarantee the safety of any Turks on business in Constantinople.

The Roman garrison abandoned Gallipoli, and the Ottomans took back their gateway to Europe.

The handover of Tenedos to the Genoese did not go as smoothly, to say the least.

The Romans living there remained loyal to the Emperor John.

You may recall that Tenedos is where Cantacusinos had sent John into exile many years before.

The people there knew him and called in the Venetians to take possession of the citadel as their master had intended.

This act sparked a brutal war between the two Italian republics, which lasted for the next five years.

The Genoese assaulted the Venetian garrison and forced Andronicus to join the campaign, which failed.

the Venetians counter-attacked the following year, sending a fleet to raid Chios.

The two sides then slugged it out in the Adriatic until a new treaty could be agreed.

As usual, the Romans suffered the most.

The grain supply of Constantinople was disrupted, causing famine, and when the two sides negotiated a settlement, it was agreed that the Byzantine population of Tenedos be forcibly removed from the island.

In June 1379, John Palaeologos and his son Manuil escaped from prison.

Probably with Venetian help they crossed the Bosphorus and made their way to Sultan Murad.

The Sultan could have executed them on the spot, or sent them back in chains to his man Andronicus, but, revealingly, he offered to support them if they would increase the tribute which he was currently receiving.

I don't think Murad needed the money.

He was simply putting all the Palaeologi in his debt, and stirring up future civil wars from which he could benefit.

So in July John and Manuel, with Turkish troops on Venetian ships, broke back into Constantinople.

Andronicus fled to Galata, with his Genoese bodyguards and some hostages.

These included his mother and her sisters, as well as the octogenarian former emperor, John Cantacuzinos.

This new chapter in the civil wars dragged on for another year and a half, as the Genoese continued to offer Andronicus shelter.

The Emperor John and his Venetian allies therefore blockaded Galata.

The Italian colony suffered from disease and famine as winter stretched to summer and then winter again.

Peace finally came in April 1381 when the Sultan brokered a deal.

A few episodes ago we talked about how the Romans had become spectators in their own civil wars, as Turks and Serbs did all the fighting for them.

At this point, the Palaeologi had become the pawns of Genoa and Venice, fighting wars with their own kin to serve Italian agendas, while everyone bowed and scraped before the Ottomans, who no one wanted to offend.

It was at this point that the Venetians were awarded Tenedos, and the Roman population were relocated, to make the island less threatening to the Genoese.

Even worse, worse, the Venetians paid the emperor nothing for this.

It was one of the few assets the empire had which could have brought them some relief from their creditors, but it was simply taken from them.

The peace deal which the Sultan arranged saw Andronicus officially forgiven and restored as his father's heir.

Yeah, you heard that right.

After starting an utterly pointless civil war that had consumed the past four years of everyone's lives, Andronicus was allowed back into the imperial hierarchy, leapfrogging Manuel, who had been at his father's side the whole time.

This was engineered by Murad to keep the Byzantines divided.

Manuel was ordered to attend on the Sultan in Anatolia while negotiations took place.

He was therefore out of the way while his father agreed to disinherit him.

Andronicus was given the Thracian port town of Salimbria to rule until his father died.

A furious Manuel sailed to Thessaloniki in secret and set himself up as an independent Roman emperor.

He had already been crowned, but was now able to ignore his ungrateful father and duplicitous brother and rule alone.

We don't really know what Manuel was thinking.

He obviously felt betrayed, but given that his father was having to face down both the Genoese and the Turks, it was hardly his choice to demote Manuel.

And though we might be tempted to see Manuel as bravely charting his own course, he was actually bringing ruin to the Empire's second city.

By breaking away from his father, he was repudiating his subordination to the Sultan, and he must have known that this would bring an onslaught from the marcher lords of the Balkans, which it did.

The Turks besieged Seres and captured it in 1383 before moving south to Thessalonica.

Its defences were too strong for a direct assault, and there was no fleet supporting the Muslims, which allowed the Romans to keep bringing in supplies, but that did not deter the Ottomans.

They installed a serious blockade and prepared to dig in.

No one could reach the city by land, and the Turks laid waste to the countryside, dragging off anyone who tried to reach their farms.

Manuel held on for three years, working hard to maintain morale, but as you can imagine, the mood in the city became increasingly poisonous.

Manuel had to confiscate church property to pay his troops, which lost him support amongst the clergy.

The wealthy citizens refused to contribute more to the city's defence, and the common people began to argue that Turkish rule was clearly God's will.

The Ottomans offered generous terms if the people surrendered, and they would have done if Manuel wasn't in the way.

Palaeologos found the attitude of the citizens deeply depressing.

He couldn't interest them in fighting for their own liberty.

But the reality was that they no longer believed in the ability of the Roman state to protect them.

Realizing that he was about to be overthrown, Manawil slipped out of the city and sailed away in April 1387.

A few days later, the Thessalonians opened the gates to the Turks, who, true to their word, did not sack the city.

This is not quite the end for Roman rule in Thessaloniki, so no elegies are needed to day.

As far as we can tell, the Turks kept a relatively low profile.

Their garrison and governor did not attempt to intervene too much in city life, though they did confiscate lots of land and raised every one's taxes.

This was the era when debate raged informally about who it was better to be conquered by, the Latins or the Turks.

Though the Turks were more terrifying and alien, the positive benefit of Muslim rule was that Roman identity was not denied, nor were orthodox practices persecuted.

As one writer put it, the Muslim will dominate your body, but the Latin will take over your soul.

Not long afterwards, though, the Turks introduced some form of the Dev Sherme, the collection of children, for the Sultan's slave army.

The city's archbishop wrote

What suffering might one not experience seeing his own child, whom he raised, over whom he shed tears praying for his happiness, being torn away from him violently by the hands of foreigners, and forced to adopt a barbaric language, dress, and religion.

A child who once attended churches is taught to murder his own kind.

For those unfortunate few, the barbarians had come for their soul.

Back in Thrace, Andronicus, whose ambitions knew no end, tried to seize a fortress that belonged to his father.

Roman troops actually killed one another over a meaningless spot on the map.

Andronicus died from an illness shortly afterwards, which may have been for the best, though his son John VII continued to rule Salimbria as emperor.

While the Romans wasted their time fighting each other, the Turkish juggernaut pressed on into Europe.

Several Serb lords and the Bulgarian Tsar had agreed to become the Sultan's vassals, and this allowed the Turks to slowly advance up the river river valleys of Macedonia and Serbia, enslaving and conquering as they went.

Orid and Prelep fell in 1380.

Skopje, Stefan Dushan's old capital, succumbed in 1386, and Nish would fall the following year.

From the perspective of Christendom, the overland routes for any crusade were being slowly cut off.

The Ottomans finally faced some pushback in 1386 as they advanced to the west of Nish.

The Serbian prince Lazar Krebelanovich managed to surprise them and deliver a shock defeat.

La Tsar controlled the lands to the north from Nish up to the Danube and now had a big target on his back.

The two sides would meet in Kosovo three years later.

It was an extremely bloody affair in which both Lazar and the Sultan Murad were killed.

But the Ottomans held the field.

Serbian resistance was shattered, and many of the lords of the region quickly signed up to be Ottoman vassals to avoid a similar fate.

Allegedly, the sultan's son, Bayezet, murdered one of his brothers on the spot to make sure that he was next in line for the throne.

Manuel Palaeologos had returned to Constantinople in the meantime, and been punished for his disobedience.

As you can imagine, his father was furious with him.

There was no need for Thessaloniki to have fallen if Manuel had put his pride to one side, so John exiled him to the island of Lemnos, despite the fact that, with Andronicus dead, Manuel was once again heir to the throne.

The game of musical chairs was far from over, though.

John VII over at Salimbria, now twenty years old, was ready to make a move.

He contacted the new sultan and asked for assistance in taking back Constantinople from his grandfather.

Bayazit was just settling into office after returning from Kosovo, but was more than happy to help the Byzantines destroy one another.

In April 1390, in a replay of a replay of a replay, John VII forced his way into Constantinople with Turkish troops and overthrew his father's father.

John Palaeologos fled from the Vlakernai Palace, but did not leave the city.

Instead, he made his way to the Golden Gate, the entrance in the land walls where imperial triumphs used to begin.

A fortress had been constructed there to increase security, and the senior emperor locked himself inside.

It tells you all you need to know about the size of the Roman army that one group could barricade themselves inside a tower within Constantinople and survive there for four months.

It was now a race against time.

Venetian sources reveal that they expected an Ottoman takeover at any moment, that young John would surely call on his patron to help him defeat his grandfather, and that the Sultan would simply take the city.

But Manuel was on the move.

His father had sent him to get help, and he approached the hospitalers of Rhodes.

The religious order had no interest in the Turks capturing Constantinople, and so lent the Vasilevs a few ships.

The heir to the throne raced back to New Rome, and after two failed attempts managed to break into the city.

John VII fled, and John V, Palaeologos, was restored, once more, to his throne.

Byazit was clearly unhappy with what had unfolded.

He helped young John return to Salimbria, and then made several demands of the senior emperor.

He wanted his annual tribute paid immediately, and in exchange for allowing John and Manuel to resume their roles in the Byzantine hierarchy, he demanded that Manuel come to Anatolia to attend on him personally.

When Manuel arrived, he found his nephew John was there as well.

The sultan was making it clear that whoever occupied Constantinople only did so at his pleasure.

Both men would be forced to walk at the back of his entourage wherever he went.

In a further humiliation, the campaign they joined him on was the conquest of Philadelphia, the only Roman city in Anatolia still under native leadership.

The former headquarters of the Thracision theme had only held out this long because it sat at the borders of three different Beyliks, none of which wanted the others to have it.

Now the Roman princes watched on as it fell to the Ottomans.

Bayezit further flexed his muscles by ordering the emperor back on the Bosphorus to demolish the fortress that had sheltered him by the Golden Gate.

If he refused, the threat was that Manuel would not be returned to him.

John Palaeologos complied.

That winter the Vasilevs fell ill, and died on the 16th of February 1391.

He was fifty-nine years old, and had ruled the empire on and off for thirty-seven years.

It's hard not to feel sorry for John Palaiologos.

Modern historians are quite scathing about him at times.

He never showed the kind of daring do which his father had, but he was rarely given the opportunity.

Though his travels west proved fruitless, they showed that he was willing to humble himself repeatedly to save his people.

He showed similar humility when bowing before the Sultan in order to give Constantinople more time to find a Saviour.

Could he have made more of an effort to forge pan-Orthodox unity?

I doubt it.

Could he have rallied Roman soldiers to achieve more?

Perhaps, but I don't think it would have changed the course of events.

He is not an inspiring figure, but our sources are too meagre to allow us to make firm judgments.

I feel sorry for him.

He was the captain of a sinking ship.

He was raised to believe that he would inherit the oldest and most splendid state in the world, and with every year that passed that state sunk further into the mire.

He watched on as his people suffered loss after loss after humiliation after humiliation, and he was largely powerless to do anything about it.

He certainly didn't have the option, as some did, of leaving that sinking ship.

This was the first period in history where Romans were abandoning their state voluntarily, moving to the west, converting to Catholicism, or going to serve the Turks.

As Manuel found at Thessaloniki, people didn't want to fight for the Roman State any more.

It was a bankrupt institution.

At least, John died a free man, a fate that did not seem likely for his children and grandchildren.

The new sultan was an aggressive conqueror who was coming for Constantinople.

Next time, the Roman Empire will surely come to an end.

Bayezid is going to besiege New Rome and make it the Ottoman capital.

I don't see any plausible way that the Byzantines will get out of this one.

Popsicles, sprinklers, a cool breeze.

Talk about refreshing.

You know what else is refreshing this summer?

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Coach, the energy out there felt different.

What changed for the team today?

It was the new game day scratchers 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.