Chapter II: Orkhan (2)

When war arose between Venice and Genoa, Stephen sent envoys to Orkhan to propose a union of the Serbian and Ottoman armies for a campaign against Constantinople. The marriage of his daughter to Orkhan’s son was to seal the alliance. Orkhan accepted this proposal. An embassy was immediately sent to Stephen to arrange the details of the alliance. But Cantacuzenos determined to prevent this change of Orkhan’s allegiance by a most drastic measure. He did not fear the anger of Orkhan as greatly as he feared a union between Orkhan and Dushan. The Ottoman envoys were ambushed. Some were killed. Those who escaped, together with the presents destined for Stephen, were taken to Demotika.[183]

Neither Stephen nor Orkhan tried to reopen the negotiations. They realized that their ambitions were too nearly identical to permit a harmonious agreement as to a division of the spoils. Macedonia was as hard to divide in the fourteenth century as it is in the twentieth. After 1351 Stephen watched to see what effect the war between Venice and Genoa was going to have upon his fortunes. He also intrigued, as Orkhan was doing, in the civil war of the Byzantines. These were his Capuan days. They were fatal to the fame of Stephen--outside of the Serbian folk-lore! The first expedition of Orkhan’s son Soleiman, in 1353, so alarmed Stephen that he tried to become reconciled to the Orthodox Church. He sent an embassy to Constantinople, but the patriarch refused his blessing until Stephen had renounced the title of emperor and his conquests east of the Vardar.[184] Stephen could not do this. Nor could he wait longer. If he did not strike quickly, the Osmanlis would be in his path. He took what was now a gambler’s chance. With eighty thousand men he started for Constantinople. Death claimed him on the second day of the march.[185] The Serbian Empire did not outlive its founder.

X

The public life of John Cantacuzenos was contemporary almost to the year with that of Stephen Dushan. He was associated with Andronicus III in the capacity of grand chancellor and confidential adviser throughout the decade which saw the loss of Nicaea and Nicomedia. Shortly after he had succeeded in deposing his grandfather, Andronicus III was taken with a violent fever. His crime-stained mind could not rid itself of the idea that he was going to die, even after he had become convalescent. He solicited Cantacuzenos to assume the imperial purple. He wanted to abdicate and take monk’s orders. A drink from a miraculous spring gave him a new grip on life.[186] For eleven years he lived on, in every crisis irresolute, in every disaster unkingly, bending always before the stronger will of Cantacuzenos. In 1341, at the early age of forty-five, his worthless life ended. His legacy to the Empress Anna and his child heir was the guardianship of his ‘friend and counsellor, John Cantacuzenos’. The grand chancellor accepted the regency with alacrity.[187]

Three months after the death of Andronicus III, Cantacuzenos crowned himself emperor at Demotika. He put the imperial crown also upon the head of his wife Irene, a Bulgarian princess. Neither in Constantinople nor in Adrianople were the pretensions of Cantacuzenos admitted. The widow of Andronicus, Anna of Savoy, refused to acknowledge the usurper. In Adrianople the inhabitants called in both Bulgarians and Turks to defend them against Cantacuzenos.[188] The Bulgarian Czar took sides secretly against his son-in-law.

The year 1342 saw the Byzantines engaged in another terrible civil war. The self-appointed emperor did not hesitate to go to Pristina and offer to Stephen Dushan Macedonia as far as Serres in exchange for Serbian aid against the Palaeologi.[189]

When the Serbian assistance proved unsatisfactory, Cantacuzenos called in the Turks of Aïdin. Omar, with 83 ships and 29,000 soldiers, came to his aid, but, because of the severe cold, returned to Asia before anything could be accomplished.[190] He came back in the spring of 1343 with 290 vessels and helped Cantacuzenos to enter Salonika. In the fall of this year Cantacuzenos led his Turkish mercenaries into Thrace. Anna appealed in vain to Venice to exercise a pressure upon the Turks and Serbians, so that they would no longer support her rival.[191] In desperation she gave Alexander of Bulgaria nine strongholds in the Rhodope Mountains in exchange for a few thousand soldiers. She resorted also to bribing the Turks in Cantacuzenos’s service, and made overtures to Orkhan.

The crusade of 1344 against the Turks of Aïdin, which resulted in the capture of Smyrna, prevented Cantacuzenos from continuing to receive substantial aid from Omar, who died four years later in an attempt to win back Smyrna.[192] Stephen Dushan, as we have already seen, was laying claim to the Byzantine throne himself. Cantacuzenos could turn only to the Osmanlis.

It was in January 1345 that Cantacuzenos made his infamous proposal to Orkhan. In exchange for six thousand soldiers he was to give his daughter Theodora to the Ottoman emir.[193] Orkhan now turned a deaf ear to the appeals of Anna. This was a better offer. The Osmanlis crossed into Europe. With their help Cantacuzenos got possession of all the coast cities of the Black Sea except Sozopolis, besieged Constantinople, ravaged the neighbourhood of the capital, and won Adrianople.[194]

It was only by threatening to change to the side of the Palaeologi that Orkhan secured the fulfilment of the bargain. In May 1346 Theodora became his bride.[195] A few days later, while Cantacuzenos was besieging the capital with the soldiers for whom he had paid so dearly, the beleaguered city was awakened by an ominous event. The eastern portion of the Church of St. Sophia had fallen.[196]

Throughout the year 1346 Constantinople was invested by Cantacuzenos and his mercenaries. The aristocratic party was almost openly championing the cause of the usurper, while Anna relied upon the democratic party and the Genoese. As for the clergy, they and the bulk of the population were more interested in the ecclesiastical trial of Barlaam for the Bogomile heresy[197] than in the civil war. In February 1347, while the Synod was in the act of condemning Barlaam, and Anna was confined to her bed with a serious illness, partisans of Cantacuzenos left the Golden Gate open. The ‘faithful friend and counsellor’ of Andronicus III entered without opposition. The garrison had been bribed, and prevented the Genoese from coming to the rescue of the empress. She yielded only when the palace of the Blachernae was attacked.

Anna agreed to recognize Cantacuzenos and Irene as co-rulers, and to a union of the families by the betrothal of Helen, daughter of Cantacuzenos, to the young John Palaeologos. John, who was fifteen, protested against marrying the thirteen-year-old Helen. His mother overruled his objections. In May the marriage took place in the church of the Blachernae, as St. Sophia was still in ruins. This ceremony was followed by the coronation of the two emperors, John Cantacuzenos and John Palaeologos, and the three empresses, Anna, Irene, and Helen.[198] Five rulers for the remnant of the Byzantine Empire! At that very moment in France, the Marquis de Montferrat, heir to the Latin emperors of Constantinople, was planning with the Pope to drive out both Cantacuzenos and Palaeologos.[199]

Orkhan was well satisfied with this entering wedge. He was now son-in-law of one emperor and brother-in-law of the other. His wife Theodora was granddaughter of the Bulgarian Czar. He had open to him also a marriage alliance with Stephen Dushan. The gods were first making mad.

Cantacuzenos was compelled immediately to seek aid again of Orkhan. While he had been expending his energies against Constantinople, Stephen Dushan had made great strides in Macedonia. At Scutari, where Orkhan had come to congratulate his father-in-law upon the happy issue of the struggle for the imperial purple, Cantacuzenos asked for six thousand Osmanlis to dislodge the Serbians from the coast cities of Macedonia. Orkhan sent the soldiers willingly. He must, however, have given them secret instructions, for after having taken immense booty they returned to Nicomedia without having captured for Cantacuzenos a single one of the cities held by Stephen.[200]

XI

It is impossible to believe that Cantacuzenos from this time onwards did not realize the danger to which he had exposed the state and the noose into which he had put his neck. The papal archives and the writings of Cantacuzenos himself reveal the fact that as early as 1347 Cantacuzenos had appealed to the Pope to unite the western princes in a crusade against the Osmanlis,[201] that these negotiations were renewed in 1349[202] and 1350,[203] and that in 1353 a last definite appeal was made to Clement by Cantacuzenos for relief against those whom he had invited into Europe to fight his battles.[204]

The five years between 1348 and 1353 gave rise to three events which were fatal to the Byzantine Empire. They made possible the permanent foothold of the Osmanlis in Europe. A man’s own efforts and a man’s ability are not the sole factors in his success. Work and genius avail nothing where opportunity is lacking. Circumstances over which he has no control contribute largely to the making of a man. Orkhan, at this culminating stage of his career, when he was ready to lead his people into the promised land, was aided by the ‘black death’, the war between Venice and Genoa, and the conflict between John Cantacuzenos and John Palaeologos.

The ‘black death’ was first heard of in the Euxine ports. It reached Constantinople in 1347, and spread to Europe the following year. In Italy it was universal, and lasted three years. From 15 to 20 per cent. of the total population died.[205] In the maritime cities that had been in close contact with the East, the duration of the epidemic was longer and the mortality higher. The moral and economic effect was great throughout Europe. Men looked with horror upon this inexplicable malady, which struck down every fifth person. It gave no warning. There were few recoveries. For years after the last case was recorded there was nervous fear of its return. Communications with the Levant had been partially cut off.[206] Full intercourse was not resumed until after Orkhan and the Osmanlis were rooted in Macedonia and Thrace. Orkhan had no crusade to fear as long as there lingered in the minds of the European peoples the memory of this scourge. The bravest and most adventurous were unwilling to fight the angel of death.

Plagues continued to visit the coast cities of the Balkan peninsula and Asia Minor from time to time during the rest of the fourteenth and the first thirty years of the fifteenth century. Between 1348 and 1431, nine great plagues are recorded.[207] These dates coincide with the most aggressive period of Ottoman conquest. As the city population was very largely Greek and Christian, we cannot over-estimate the importance of these epidemics. They were a valuable auxiliary in enabling the Osmanlis to advance and assimilate without formidable opposition.

The ‘black death’ had hardly run its course in Italy when the commercial rivalries of Genoa and Venice culminated in a bitter war, that lasted for two years, with varying fortunes, until the battle of Lojera in 1353 broke the sea-power of Genoa. After five centuries of independence the Genoese were compelled to put themselves under the protection of Milan. The hatred engendered by this struggle is revealed in the archives of the two republics. They left unturned no stone to destroy each other. The history of Venice and Genoa during the fourteenth century reads like that of Sparta and Athens. The scene of the conflict is the same: the motive, the spirit, and the result are identical. Venice gained no material advantage from the war. She had long been alive to the menace of the Osmanlis.[208] She had been warned by Petrarch of the certain danger which a war with Genoa would entail, whether its outcome were favourable or unfavourable.[209]

The Ottoman and Byzantine historians are silent concerning the relations of the Osmanlis with the Genoese during this war. That the Genoese asked for and received aid from Orkhan is certain. There had been a convention beforehand between the Osmanlis and the Genoese of Pera.[210] Both against the Greeks and against the Venetians the assistance of Orkhan must have been substantial.[211] It was remembered with gratitude forty years later.[212]

The triumphal entry into Constantinople and the sanction of the Church upon his imperial office did not end the troubles of Cantacuzenos. The first to turn against him was his own son Matthew, who also wanted to be emperor. Cantacuzenos appeased him for a time by giving him a portion of Thrace. Then the Genoese of Pera, dissatisfied with the lowering of the customs tariff to other nations, burned the Greek galleys and arsenals, and attacked Constantinople. Cantacuzenos had to leave a sick-bed at Demotika to hurry to save the city. The Greek fleet was destroyed by the Genoese. The army of Cantacuzenos failed in an attack upon Galata. Peace was concluded only when the unhappy emperor agreed to sell more land on the Golden Horn to the Genoese, and restore them in the customs tariffs to their former place as ‘most favoured nation’.[213]

In 1349 Cantacuzenos called again upon Orkhan to send soldiers to him in Europe. Twenty thousand Ottoman cavaliers, under the command of Matthew, marched against Salonika, which was on the point of giving itself to Stephen Dushan. Cantacuzenos, with the young emperor John, went by sea. Orkhan, as on the last occasion, secretly worked against his father-in-law. After Cantacuzenos had already sailed, he recalled the horsemen who were with Matthew. It was fortunate for Cantacuzenos that he met at Amphipolis a Turkish fleet which was about to land a force of raiders to ravage the country, and persuaded the commander to join with him in a demonstration against Salonika. Otherwise the expedition would have been a fiasco. As it was, Salonika surrendered. The army of Cantacuzenos ascended the Vardar as far as Uskub, which was reoccupied.[214]

It would be too wearisome to go into all the details of the civil war between Cantacuzenos and John Palaeologos. Involved in it are the intrigues of Stephen Dushan of Serbia and Alexander of Bulgaria, and the attitude of Venice and Genoa. At first it seemed as if Cantacuzenos would be crushed. The partisans of Palaeologos besieged Matthew in the citadel of Adrianople. The Genoese of Galata, in spite of the strong Venetian fleet whose co-operation, however, with the Greeks was lukewarm,[215] compelled Cantacuzenos to cede Silivria and Heraclea, besides increasing their Galata lands.[216] In the fall of 1352 the Venetians and Bulgarians declared openly for Palaeologos.[217]

In desperation Cantacuzenos fell back for the last time upon the Osmanlis. He robbed the churches of the capital to pay Orkhan for twenty thousand soldiers, and promised him a fortress in the Thracian Chersonese.[218] With this help he recaptured Adrianople, and relieved Matthew, who was still holding the citadel. The Serbians were beaten by Orkhan’s eldest son, Soleiman, near Demotika. All of Thrace and most of Macedonia returned to the allegiance of Cantacuzenos.[219]

In 1353 Cantacuzenos seemed to have recovered all the lost ground, and to be at the height of his fortunes. John Palaeologos, abandoned by his partisans, was in exile at Tenedos. An attempt to win back Constantinople by intrigue failed. Cantacuzenos, now practically sole ruler, felt that it was time to establish a new imperial line. He had Matthew proclaimed co-emperor.[220] In his prosperity he forgot about Orkhan, who had put him where he was, he forgot that he had invited the Osmanlis into Europe and had shown them the fertile valleys of Macedonia and Thrace, that their fighting men had passed along the military roads of the empire under the command of himself and his son, that he had mustered Ottoman armies under the walls of Salonika, of Adrianople, of Demotika, and even of Constantinople.

XII

The Ottoman historians place the first invasion of European territory by the Osmanlis in the year of the Hegira 758 (1356), and state that Soleiman crossed the Hellespont one moonlight night with three hundred warriors, and seized the castle of Tzympe, between Gallipoli and the Aegaean Sea end of the strait.[221] It is represented as a romantic adventure, prompted by a dream in which Soleiman saw the moonbeams make a tempting path for him from Asia into Europe.[222] The earlier western historians give a variety of dates. Some ascribe the first crossing to Murad.[223] Several claim that the Osmanlis were transported by two small Genoese merchant ships, and that there were sixty thousand of them! The Genoese received a ducat per head. All the calamities of the ‘Turks’ were brought upon Europe by the avarice of the Genoese.[224]

We can reject these stories without hesitation, just as we can reject the date which the Ottoman historians give.[225] The Osmanlis had been fighting in Europe since 1345. They had come over in large numbers on different occasions. There is nothing mysterious or romantic about their first foothold in Europe. In 1352 Cantacuzenos had promised to Orkhan a fortress in the Thracian Chersonese. Tzympe may have been given to Soleiman, or it was taken by him when the promise of Cantacuzenos was not fulfilled. He did not have to cross secretly from Asia. The Ottoman soldiers were already at home in Europe, and Soleiman had been their leader in several expeditions.

Shortly after the occupation of Tzympe, one of those earthquakes which occur so often in the Thracian Chersonese destroyed a portion of the walls of Gallipoli. This was Soleiman’s opportunity. He occupied the city, repaired the breaches, and called over from Bithynia the first colony of Osmanlis. Other colonies followed rapidly, as the soldiers of Soleiman took Malgara, Bulaïr (the key of the peninsula),[226] and the European littoral of the Sea of Marmora as far as Rodosto. The advance-guard of the Osmanlis appeared within a few miles of Constantinople; and ‘conducted themselves as masters’.[227] This colonization was so quickly and easily effected that one is led to believe that these colonists were for the most part renegade Greeks returning to their former homes.

Cantacuzenos now reaped the full harvest of his policy. The patriarch Callixtus refused to consecrate Matthew. He reproached Cantacuzenos for having delivered Christians into the hands of the infidels, and accused him of having given to Orkhan the money sent by a Russian prince for the restoration of St. Sophia.[228] Compelled to flee for his life to the Genoese in Galata, the patriarch decided to declare for Palaeologos. When Cantacuzenos chose a new patriarch, Philotheus, who consented as price of office to consecrate Matthew, Callixtus excommunicated him. Philotheus returned the compliment. Then Callixtus sailed for Tenedos to join John Palaeologos.[229]

Cantacuzenos, feeling the precariousness of his position at Constantinople just at the moment when he thought he had triumphed over every obstacle to his ambition, bitterly reproached Orkhan for not having kept faith with him. He offered to buy back Tzympe for ten thousand ducats, and asked Orkhan to order the Osmanlis to leave Gallipoli. Orkhan accepted the ransom for Tzympe, knowing well that he could reoccupy this fortress when he wanted to.[230] As for Gallipoli, he declared that he could not give back what God had given him. Was it not the will of God rather than force of arms that had opened the gates of Gallipoli to him? Cantacuzenos sought an interview with his son-in-law, for he thought that gold might induce the Osmanlis to withdraw. A meeting was arranged in the Gulf of Nicomedia. When the emperor arrived at the rendezvous, a messenger from Orkhan reported that his master was ill and could not come.[231] No way was left open for further negotiations. The rupture was complete.

After his return to Constantinople, Cantacuzenos sent envoys to the Serbians and to the Bulgarians to urge a defensive alliance of the Balkan Christians. They answered, ‘Defend yourself as best you can.’ A second embassy met with the response from Czar Alexander: ‘Three years ago I remonstrated with you for your unholy alliances with the Turks. Now that the storm has broken, let the Byzantines weather it. If the Turks come against us, we shall know how to defend ourselves.’[232]

The indignation of the Greeks against the man who had sacrificed them to his inordinate ambition reached the breaking-point in November 1354. The inhabitants of Constantinople declared for John Palaeologos. Cantacuzenos was forced to barricade himself in his palace. Protected by Catalans and other mercenaries, he tried to temporize. He offered to abdicate if Matthew were allowed to retain the title of emperor with the governorship of Adrianople and the Rhodope district. Encouraged by a lull in the storm of popular feeling, he had the audacity to make an ‘appeal to patriotism’, as he himself put it. He urged the people to support him in an expedition to retake the provinces conquered by the Serbians and the Osmanlis. This exhibition of effrontery was greeted with cries of scorn. Cantacuzenos was publicly accused of wishing to deliver Constantinople to Orkhan. A second revolution forced his abdication. He became a monk. Irene took the veil.[233]

John Palaeologos returned from exile, and restored Callixtus to the patriarchal throne. It took several years of fighting and negotiating to compel Matthew’s abdication. Not until 1358 did John V become undisputed ruler of the remnant of the empire in Macedonia and Thrace.[234] But the mischief was done. The Osmanlis had put their foot as settlers on European soil.

Cantacuzenos lived for thirty years in the monastery of Mistra, near old Sparta. It was long enough for him to see the irreparable injury that his ambition had caused to his country, and to realize how he had destroyed the people to rule over whom he had sacrificed every higher and nobler instinct. Cantacuzenos has had a fair trial before the bar of posterity. For many long years, far removed from the turmoil of the world, were spent in the building up of his brief of justification. He left a history of his life and times. So he pleads for himself. But even if we did not have the testimony of Gregoras, and of the archives of the Italian cities and of the Vatican, to supplement the story of Cantacuzenos, he would stand condemned by his own record of facts.

Cantacuzenos had far more natural ability than Andronicus II and Andronicus III. During the long and arduous struggle to satisfy his personal ambition, he showed himself a keen, courageous, resourceful leader. At the beginning of his career he was in a position of commanding influence. His country was facing a crisis which would have called forth the best and noblest in one who loved his race, his religion, and his fatherland. But John Cantacuzenos loved only himself. The legacy of the widow and helpless child of the friend who had trusted and honoured him gave to Cantacuzenos the opportunity for developing true greatness in the fulfilment of that highest of missions--a sacred trust. But Cantacuzenos saw only the opportunity for taking advantage of a dead man’s faith.

To say that Cantacuzenos was the cause of the downfall of the Byzantine Empire would be to ignore other forces working to the same end, and to put too great an emphasis upon the power of an individual human will to shape the destinies of the world. However, in the stage of world history, leaders of men are the personification of causes. We group everything around them. The character and acts of Cantacuzenos reveal the fatal weakness in the Balkan peninsula of his day. The Ottoman conquest was possible because there was no consciousness of religious or racial commonweal. How could this larger devotion, this larger sense of duty and obligation, be expected in men who were not influenced, much less constrained, by ties of blood and personal friendship?

XIII

Cantacuzenos ceased to be a factor in Byzantine affairs in 1355. But the Greeks could not rid themselves as easily of Orkhan. The Osmanlis had come to stay.

It is impossible to establish with any degree of certainty the conquests of Soleiman pasha in the hinterland of the Gulf of Saros and of the Sea of Marmora. But we know that he captured Demotika, and cut off Constantinople from Adrianople by occupying Tchorlu.[235] If these important places were retaken by the Byzantines after the premature death of Soleiman, it was only for a brief time. At the beginning of the reign of Murad the Osmanlis were firmly ensconced along the coasts of Thrace, and had made some permanent progress into the interior.

There was a sudden and full awakening on the part of the Greeks to the knowledge that the Ottoman invasion of 1354 was an irreparable disaster. A year before Soleiman pasha settled his Moslem colonies in the Thracian Chersonese, the inhabitants of Philadelphia had felt themselves so completely abandoned by their emperors that they had appealed directly to the Pope for aid, promising to return to the Roman communion.[236] At the approach of the Osmanlis in Thrace, the country population had fled to Constantinople, abandoning everything. Those who had money to emigrate elsewhere did so immediately. They had no hope of a change in the fortunes of their country.[237]

The annalists of the Byzantine Empire record no heroic, bitter resistance to the army of Soleiman pasha. There was no mayor of the palace, no Joan, to revive the confidence of the people in their rulers, or to replace the family that had proved its unfitness. The Greeks had feared Cantacuzenos, and had attributed their hopeless condition to his alliance with the Osmanlis. But they could not have greater confidence in John Palaeologos. For he made no effort, not even in the smallest way, to demonstrate that he was different from his weak and disloyal forbears.

The Byzantines feared also the intrigues of the Genoese, who were as persistent in their efforts to undermine the integrity of the Byzantine Empire, as are the foreigners to-day engaged in commerce in the Levant to weaken and destroy the authority of the Ottoman Empire.[238] The banishment of Cantacuzenos could not save them from the Osmanlis. Palaeologos could not save them. They could not save themselves. The only way which occurred to them of preventing the Ottoman conquest was to give themselves to some Christian power. There were actually plans on foot to offer the remnant of the empire to Venice, to Hungary, even to Serbia![239]

In France, during the fourteenth century, the Turks were not regarded as a permanent factor in the Near East. Western Asia Minor was not called ‘Turquie’ or ‘Turquemanie’, but ‘the land which the Turks hold’.[240] There was no such illusion among the Italians. They accustomed themselves very rapidly to the idea that the Osmanlis, if not the Turkish tribes, were in Asia Minor and the Aegaean to stay.

The immigration across the Hellespont in 1354 was not looked upon by those who were acquainted with the weakness and impotence of the Byzantines as a raid or as a temporary affair. For several years the Genoese had thought it to their advantage to seek the friendship of Orkhan.[241] In 1355 two far-sighted Venetians wrote the whole truth to the Senate. They did not mince matters. Matteo Venier, baily at Constantinople, warned the Senate in the strongest terms about the menace of Ottoman aggrandizement.[242] Marino Falieri went farther. He pointed out that the Byzantine Empire must inevitably become the booty of the Osmanlis, and urged his countrymen to get ahead of them.[243] Prophetic words and daring suggestion. Had Venice at this time had a Dandolo of the stamp of the intrepid blind Doge who diverted the Fourth Crusade to wreak his vengeance upon his mutilators, Islam might have been kept out of Europe.

When John Palaeologos resumed the throne of his fathers, he found himself as much at the mercy of Orkhan as Cantacuzenos had been. His dependence is revealed in the story of Halil. Halil, son of Orkhan and Theodora, was captured by pirates in 1357, and taken to Phocaea. Orkhan held his brother-in-law responsible for this kidnapping, and called upon him to rescue his nephew. In February 1358, while the Osmanlis under Soleiman pasha were advancing in Thrace, we see John V, at the behest of Orkhan, spending what strength and energy he had in the siege of Phocaea. Later, when he went back to Constantinople, Orkhan peremptorily ordered him to return to direct in person the siege. John started out, and met his fleet, which had become anxious about his absence and had given up the siege. He could not persuade the galleys to turn back with him. So he wrote to Orkhan begging to be excused from continuing an undertaking beyond his power to carry through successfully.

Orkhan was inflexible. He had now become the overlord of the Byzantine emperor. In March 1359 the successor of Constantine went as a vassal to meet his Ottoman suzerain at Scutari. He appeased the wrath of Orkhan only by agreeing to pay a half of Halil’s ransom, and by signing a treaty of peace that was a virtual acceptance of the new _status quo_ in Thrace. The peace was to be sealed by the betrothal of his ten-year-old daughter to Halil. It was as errand boy of Orkhan that John V made one more trip to Phocaea, paid one hundred thousand pieces of gold for Halil, and brought him to Nicaea. There the betrothal of the Christian princess to her Moslem cousin was celebrated by splendid fêtes.[244]

John Cantacuzenos introduced the Osmanlis into Europe. John Palaeologos accepted their presence in Thrace without a struggle. There is little choice between these two Johns.

XIV

Orkhan died at the end of this memorable decade.[245] If to Osman is given the honour of being father of a new people, the greater honour of founding the nation must be ascribed to Orkhan.[246] Few men have accomplished a greater work and seen more sweeping changes in two generations. According to popular legend, Orkhan won his spurs as a warrior, and a bride to boot, at the capture of Biledjik, when he was twelve years old. His life was spent in fighting and in making permanent the results of his fighting. He was as simple in his tastes as his father had been. At Nicaea he distributed soup and bread to the poor with his own hands.[247]

There seems to be no basis for the characterization of Orkhan which the early western historians handed down to posterity. He was neither vicious nor cruel nor deceitful. His three striking characteristics were those which mark all men who have accomplished a great work in history, oneness of purpose, inexhaustible energy, and an unlimited capacity for detail. He began life as a village lad of an obscure tribe. After a public career of sixty years he died, the brother-in-law of the emperor of Byzantium, the friend and ally of Genoa, and potentially master of Thrace. The purpose of his life is summed up in the sentence we find upon his coins: ‘May God cause to endure the empire of Orkhan, son of Osman.’