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Palaeologue Dynasty - 1261-1453

Three Greek states emerged from the ruin of the Roman Empire. A member of the Comnenian house had founded an independent state at Trebizond, and this empire survived till 1461, when it was conquered by the Ottomans. A relation of the Angeli maintained in Europe an independent Greek state known as the Despotate of Epirus. But the true representative of the imperial line was Theodore Lascaris, who collected the Byzantine aristocracy at Nicaea and was elected emperor in 1206. He and his successors advanced surely and rapidly against the Latin Empire, both in Europe and Asia. It was a question whether Constantinople would fall to the Walacho-Bulgarians or to the Greeks.

But an astute diplomat and general, the emperor Michael Palaeologus, captured it in 1261. His object was to recover all the lost territory from the Latins, but he was menaced by a great danger through Charles of Anjou, who had overthrown the rule of the Hohenstaufens in the two Sicilies, and determined to restore the Latin kingdom of Romania. To avert this peril, Michael negotiated with Pope Gregory X; he was ready to make every concession, and a formal union of the Churches was actually brought about at the council of Lyons in 1274. The emperor had the utmost difficulty in carrying through this policy in face of clerical opposition; it aroused disgust and bitterness among his subjects; and it was undone by his successor. Meanwhile the pope had with difficulty bridled Charles of Anjou; but in Martin IV. he found a more pliable instrument, and in 1282 he made vast preparations for an expedition against the Greek Empire. It was saved by the Sicilian Vespers, to be the prey of other powers.

The end of the 13th century saw the rise of the Ottoman power in Asia and the Servian in Europe. The Empire was assisted by a band of Spanish mercenaries (the Catalan Grand Company) against the advance of the Ottoman Turks in Asia Minor; they distinguished themselves by saving Philadelphia (1304). In 1326 Brusa (Prusa) became the Ottoman capital, white on the other side the Servians (crushing the Bulgarians in 1330) were gradually closing in on Byzantium. Under Stephen Dusan (1331-135$) Servia attained the height of her power. The enemies were strengthened by the domestic struggles within the Empire, first between Andronicus II and his son, then between John VI. and the usurper Cantacuzenus. But before the fate of Byzantium was settled the two enemies on its flanks came face to face.

In 1387 the Servian power was crushed on the field of Kossovo by the Ottomans (who had crossed the Hellespont in 1360 and taken PhilippopoUs in 1363). Sultan Bayezid I. won Philadelphia, the last Asiatic possession of the Empire, and conquered Trnovo, the Bulgarian capital, in 1393. Constantinople was now surrounded. The Ottoman power was momentarily eclipsed, and the career of conquest checked, by the Mongol invasion of Timur and the great defeat which it sustained in the battle of Angora (1402). Mabommed I. found it necessary to ally himself with the emperor Manuel. But the pause was brief. Murad II. took Adrianople, and tried (1422) to take Constantinople.

It was small compensation that during this time the Palaeologi had been successful against the Franks in Greece. The situation was desperate. The Turks were in possession of the Balkan peninsula, threatening Hungary; there was no chance of rescue, except from western Europe. John VI. and Manuel had both visited the West in search of help. The jeopardy of the Empire was the opportunity of Rome, and the union of the Churches became the pressing question. It was taken up earnestly by Pope Eugenius IV., and the result was the Decree of Union at the council of Florence in 1439. The emperor and the higher clergy were really in earnest, but the people and the monks did not accept it, and the last agony of Byzantium was marked by ecclesiastical quarrels.

Eugenius IV preached a crusade for the rescue of the Empire, and in 1443 an army of Hungarians and Poles, led by the Hungarian king, won a victory over Murad, which was more than avenged in the next year on the memorable field of Varna. The end came nine years later under Murad's successor, Mahommed II. An army of about 150,000 blockaded the city by land and sea, and Mahommed began the siege on the 7th of April. The emperor Constantine XI Palaeologus, on whom the task of the forlorn defence devolved (and whose position was all the more difficult because he was alienated from his subjects, having embraced the Latin rite), can have had little more than 8000 men at his disposal; he received no help from the Western powers; but an experienced Genoese soldier of fortune, John Justiniani, arrived with two vessels and 400 cuirassiers and aided the emperor with his courage and advice. The resident foreigners, both Venetians and Genoese, loyally shared in the labours of the defence.

The final storm of the land walls took place on the night of the 29th of May. All looked to Justiniani for salvation, and when he, severely wounded, retired from the wall to have his wound looked to, a panic ensued. The enemy seized the moment, and the Janissaries in a final charge rushed the stockade which had been constructed to replace a portion of the wall destroyed by the Turkish cannon. This decided the fate of the city. Constantino fell fighting heroically. Soon after sunrise (May 30) the Mahommedan army entered Constantinople, which was in their eyes the capital of Christendom.

The ultimate responsibility for this disaster is generally imputed to the political adventurers who dismembered the Empire in 1204. It may indeed be said that at that time the Byzantine state seemed already stricken with paralysis and verging to dissolution, and it was menaced by the re-arisen power of Bulgaria. But more than once before (in the 7th century and in the nth) it had recovered its strength when it was weak and in dire peril; and, considering what the emperors of Nicaea and Michael VIII. accomplished, it seems probable that, if there had been no Fourth Crusade, it might have so revived and consolidated its forces in the course of the 13th century, as to be able to cope successfully with the first advances of the Ottomans. The true statement is that the Fourth Crusade was only an incident (not in itself decisive) in a world-movement which doomed the Eastern Empire to extinction - namely, the eastward movement of western Europe which began in the 11th century with the rise of the Normans and the First Crusade. Henceforward the Empire was a middle state, pressed between expanding forces on the east and on the west, and its ultimate disappearance was inevitable.

The princess Zoe, married in 1472 the grand prince Ivan III Vassilievitch of Moscow, thereby placing her claims in the hands of Russia. Ivan adopted a new coat of arms for Russia, the two-headed eagle, which may be seen to-day in the Kremlin at Moscow, and sent an ambassador to Stamboul, naturally to no purpose. In accordance with the researches of the Russian Vladimir J. Savva concerning the Muscovite Czars and the Byzantine Emperors, Karl Roth has argued against these constitutional and hereditary rights consequent upon the marriage of Ivan with Zoe Palaiologos, otherwise Sophia. Better founded, perhaps, were the claims which the Jagellon Alexander I of Poland inherited as the husband of Zoe's daughter Helene. On the other hand, Andreas, recognised as titular despot of the Morea by Pope Paul II in 1465, an unworthy brother of Zoe, and the last, male descendant of the royal house of the Palaiologoi, in order to relieve his financial difficulties, sold his rights to the French king Charles VIII in 1494, and bequeathed them on his death (April 7,1502) to the Spanish rulers Ferdinand and Isabella.