Decline & Fall - Byzantium 03 by John Julius Norwich

Author:John Julius Norwich [Norwich, John Julius]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Non Fiction
ISBN: 9780679416500
Publisher: New York : Knopf, 1996.
Published: 2010-06-25T23:00:00+00:00

Of seven and seventy thousand soldiers.

All was holy, all was honourable,

And the goodness of God was fulfilled.

The Kosovo Cycle

With the departure of John VI Cantacuzenus, it was generally acknowledged by all the princes of Christendom that Byzantium was on the verge of collapse. To what power, however, was it to fall? Already four months before the abdication, the Venetian bailo in Constantinople had reported to his government that the Byzantines were ready to make their submission to anyone who asked them to; four months after it, we find the Doge of Venice proposing the immediate annexation of the Empire, if only to save it from the Ottoman tide.

As it happened, however, there was at that moment another power in eastern Europe more powerful than either Venice or the Turks: Stephen Dushan, whose dominions encompassed — as well as Serbia, Macedonia and much of Bulgaria - the entire Greek mainland as far as the Gulf of Corinth, excepting only Attica, Boeotia and the Peloponnese. Throughout his life, Stephen had been inspired by a single dream - to rule his own Serbian Empire from the imperial throne in Constantinople. To this end he had negotiated at one time or another with every ruler in Europe who might have proved useful to him, including the Turkish Emirs and even the Pope, over whom he had dangled the usual bait of ecclesiastical union; and he might well have achieved his ambition - and even, conceivably, changed the history of Europe - had he not been stricken by sudden illness while still in his prime. He died in December 1355, aged only forty-six, having made no proper arrangements for the succession.

Immediately his Empire began to disintegrate. His son Stephen Urosh V, who had been left in charge of the old Serbian region to the north while Stephen Dushan had governed the Greek lands of 'Romania', had neither the ability nor the authority to prevent various other members of his family — and even quite humble members of his court1 - from declaring themselves independent princes. Within a year, the 'Empire of the Serbs and Greeks' was as if it had never been. To the Byzantines it seemed an almost miraculous deliverance. In fact, however - as they well knew — they were themselves too weak to draw any positive advantage. John V made no effort to recapture the former Byzantine dominions, and although Nicephorus II, the deposed Despot of Epirus, made a determined attempt to do so he had achieved little before being killed in battle in 1358. The truth was that the death of Dushan meant nothing more than the substitution of one threat by another: for the collapse of the Serbian Empire presented the Turks with just the opportunity that they had been waiting for. No longer was there any power in Europe capable of resisting their advance.

Although John V had already been co-Emperor for fourteen years, he was still only twenty-three — and a very different person from his father-in-law. Where John

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