The external policy of Byzantium during the reigns of the Andronicoi.

        The external policy of Andronicus II and Andronicus III, grandfather and grandson, differed from that of their predecessor, Michael VIII. A great danger had menaced Michael from the West, from Charles to Anjou; but the Sicilian Vespers had removed that danger forever in the year of Michael’s death. The Turks had been prevented by their own troubles from making adequate use of their advantageous position on the eastern border of the Empire.

        Andronicus II and Andronicus III had to face two new and strong foes: Serbia in the Balkan peninsula and the Ottoman Turks in Asia Minor. Like Charles of Anjou, the rulers of these two peoples had set as their definite goal in the struggle with Byzantium, the complete destruction of the Empire and the formation on its site of either a Greco-Slavonic or a Greco-Turkish Empire. Charles’ plan to establish the Greco-Latin Empire had failed. In the fourteenth century the great king of Serbia, Stephen Dushan (Dušan), seemed to be on the point of establishing a great Slavonic empire. But for many reasons only the Ottoman Turks were to succeed in carrying out this plan: in the middle of the fifteenth century they were to establish an enormous empire, not only Greco-Turkish, but Greco-Slavo-Turkish, controlling both the Serbs and the Bulgars.

The Ottoman Turks. — The rise of the Ottoman Turks was the chief phenomenon in the East in the epoch of the two Andronicoi. Advancing toward Asia Minor, the Mongols had pushed back to the West, from the Persian province of Khorasan (Khurasan), a Turkish horde of the tribe of Ghuzz, who had come into the territory of the sultanate of Iconium, and been allowed by the sultan to stay and pasture their herds. After the defeat inflicted by the Mongols the Kingdom of the Seljuqs divided into several independent possessions (emirates) with separate dynasties, which harassed the Empire severely. Along with this disintegration of the Empire of the Seljuqs, the Turkish horde of Ghuzz also became independent. At the very end of the thirteenth century their leader was Osman (Othman), who began the dynasty of the Ottomans and gave his name to the Turks who were under his control; from that time on they were called the Ottoman Turks. The dynasty founded by Osman ruled in Turkey until 1923.[76]

        From the end of the thirteenth century on, the Ottoman Turks began to harass seriously the small possessions in Asia Minor which still remained in the power of Byzantium. The imperial troops held with difficulty the three most important points in Asia Minor; Brusa, Nicaea, and Nicomedia. The co-emperor Michael IX was sent against the Turks and defeated. Constantinople itself seemed in danger, and the Emperor “seemed to sleep or be dead.”[77]

The Spanish (Catalan) companies in the East. — Andronicus could not master the situation without foreign aid, and he got such aid from the Spanish mercenary bands, the so-called “Catalan companies,” or “almughavars.”[78] Mercenary bands of various nationalities, under the name of “companies,” which lived only for war and would fight for pay for anyone against anyone, were very well known in the latter half of the Middle Ages. “The Catalan companies,” which consisted not only of Catalans, but also of the inhabitants of Aragon, Navarre, the island of Majorca, and other places, fought as mercenaries on the side of Peter of Aragon during the war which burst out after the Sicilian Vespers. When at the very beginning of the fourteenth century a peace was concluded between Sicily and Naples, the Catalans were out of work. Such allies, accustomed to war, pillage, and violence, became in time of peace dangerous to those who had invited them, and who now tried to get rid of them. Moreover, the companies themselves, finding no satisfaction in peaceful living conditions, sought new opportunities for activity. The Catalans chose for leader Roger de Flor, a German by origin, whose father’s surname, Blum (i.e. a flower), was translated into Spanish as “Flor.”

        With the consent of his companions Roger, who spoke Greek fluently, offered his services to Andronicus II for his struggle with the Seljuq and Ottoman Turks and extorted from the hard pressed Emperor unheard-of conditions: the insolent adventurer demanded the consent of Andronicus to his marriage with the Emperor’s niece, the granting of the title of megadukas (admiral), and a large sum of money for his company. Andronicus was compelled to yield, and the Spanish companies took ship and sailed for Constantinople.

        The participation of the Spaniards in the destinies of Byzantium is narrated in detail both in the Spanish (Catalan) sources and in the Greek. But while a participant of the expedition, the Catalan chronicler Muntaner[79] described Roger and his companions as courageous and noble fighters for a right cause, a credit to their country, Greek historians consider the Catalans pillagers and insolent ruffians, and one of them exclaimed: “Would that Constantinople had never seen the Latin Roger!”[80] Historians of the nineteenth century devoted much attention to the Catalan expedition. A Spanish investigator of the problem compared their deeds with those of the famous Spanish conquerors of Mexico and Peru in the sixteenth century, Cortez and Pizarro; he does not know “what other people may plume themselves on such a historical event as our glorious expedition to the East,” and he considered the expedition an eternal testimony to the glory of the Spanish race.[81] The German historian Hopf declared that “the Catalan expedition is the most attractive episode in the history of the Empire of the Palaeologi,” especially on account of its dramatic interest.[82] Finlay wrote that the Catalans “guided by a sovereign like Leo III or like Basil II, might have conquered the Seljuq Turks, strangled the Ottoman power in its cradle, and carried the double-headed eagle of Byzantium victorious to the foot of Mount Taurus and to the banks of the Danube.”[83] Elsewhere the same historian remarked: “The expedition of the Catalans in the East is a wonderful instance of the success which sometimes attends a career of rapacity and crime, in opposition to all the ordinary maxims of human prudence.”[84] The Spanish archives still afford much new information on this expedition.

        At the very beginning of the fourteenth century Roger de Flor with his company arrived in Constantinople.[85] There were almost ten thousand members of the expedition; but this number included wives, mistresses, and children. The marriage of Roger to the Emperor’s niece was celebrated at Constantinople with great pomp. After some serious conflicts in the capital between the Catalans and Genoese, who, jealous for their exceptional privileges in the Empire, felt the newcomers their rivals, the company was finally transported into Asia Minor, where the Turks were besieging the large city of Philadelphia, east of Smyrna. Supported by a band of imperial troops the small Hispano-Byzantine army, under Roger de Flor, freed Philadelphia from the Turkish siege. The victory of the western mercenaries was enthusiastically received in the capital; some men thought that the Turkish danger to the Empire was over forever. The first success was followed by others against the Turks in Asia Minor. But the unbearable extortions and arbitrary cruelties of the Catalans towards the local population, on one hand, and the clearly expressed intention of Roger to establish in Asia Minor a principality of his own, though under the Emperor’s suzerainty, on the other, strained the relations between the mercenaries, the people of Asia Minor, and the government of Constantinople. The Emperor recalled Roger to Europe, and the latter with his company crossed the Hellespont and occupied first an important fortress on the straits of Gallipoli, and then the whole peninsula of Gallipoli. The new negotiations between Roger and the Emperor ended in Roger’s obtaining the title next to the Emperor’s, that of Caesar, never till then borne by a foreigner. Before marching again to Asia Minor the new Caesar went with a small band to Hadrianople, where the eldest son of Andronicus, the co-emperor Michael IX, resided. On Michael’s instigation, Roger and his companions were slain during a festival. When these tidings spread among the population of the Empire, the Spaniards in the capital and other cities were also murdered.

        The Catalans, who were concentrated at Gallipoli, inflamed and thirsty for revenge, broke their obligations as allies of the Empire and set out to the West, ravaging with fire and sword the regions through which they passed. Thrace and Macedonia were terribly devastated. Not even monasteries on Mount Athos were spared. An eyewitness, a pupil of Daniel, igumen (abbot) of the Serbian monastery of Chilandarion, on Mount Athos, wrote: “It was horror to see then the desolation of the Holy Mountain by the hands of enemies.”[86] The Catalans also burned the Russian monastery of St. Panteleemon, on Mount Athos, but their assault on Thessalonica failed. In retaliation for the Catalan devastations Andronicus commanded the merchandise of some Catalan vessels in the Byzantine waters seized and the merchants themselves arrested.[87]

        After having stayed some time in Thessaly, the Catalans marched to the south, through the famous pass of Thermopylae, into middle Greece to the territory of the Duchy of Athens and Thebes, which had been founded after the Fourth Crusade and was under French control. In the spring of 1311 there took place a battle in Boeotia, at the river of the Cephisus, near the Lake of Copais (near the modern village of Skripù). The Catalans won a decisive victory over the French troops. Putting an end to the flourishing French duchy of Athens and Thebes, they established there Spanish control which lasted for eighty years. The church of the Holy Virgin, the ancient Parthenon on the Acropolis, passed into the hands of the Catalan clergy, who were impressed by its sublimity and riches. In the second half of the fourteenth century a Spanish duke of Athens called the Acropolis “the most precious jewel that exists in the world, and such as all the kings of Christendom together would imitate in vain.”[88]

        The Athenian Duchy of the Catalans established by mere accident in the fourteenth century and organized upon Spanish or Sicilian models, has generally been considered a harsh, oppressive, and destructive government, which at Athens and in Greece in general has left very few material traces of its domination. On the Acropolis, for instance, the Catalans carried out some changes, especially in the disposition of the fortifications, but no traces of them remain. But in Greek popular tradition and in the Greek tongue there still linger reminiscences of the cruelty and injustice of the Spanish invaders. Even today, in some regions of Greece, for example, in the island of Euboea, a man in condemnation of illegal or unjust action may say: “Not even the Catalans would have done that.” In Acarnania to the present day the word “Catalan” is the synonym for “savage, robber, criminal.” At Athens the word “Catalan” is considered an insult. In some cities of the Peloponnesus, when one wishes to say that a woman possesses a bad character, one says, “She must be a Catalan woman.”[89]

        But recently much new material, especially in the Archives of Barcelona (the archives de la Corona d’Aragó), has come to light which shows that the conception of former historians on this subject was biased. The years of the Catalan domination in middle Greece in the fourteenth century were not only troubled and destructive; they were productive. The Acropolis, which was called in Catalan Castell de Cetines, was fortified; for the first time since the closing of the Athenian school by Justinian the Great, a university was established at Athens.[90] Catalan fortifications were also erected in middle and northern Greece.[91] A modern Catalan historian, the best recent authority on the Catalan problem in Middle Greece, A. Rubió y Lluch, declared, “The discovery of a Catalan Greece is, in our opinion, one of the most unexpected surprises the modern investigators have had in the history of medieval political life.”[92] Of course, the full story of the Catalan dominion in Greece remains to be learned; but we must realize that the older works and former opinions on this problem of many very eminent scholars must be rectified, and that a new history of the Catalan dominion in Greece must be told on the basis of new material.[93] The Navarrese invasion in 1379 dealt a death blow to the Catalan dominion in Greece.

Successes of the Turks in Asia Minor. — At the very beginning of the fourteenth century the Catalan company fought successfully against the Ottoman Turks. But these military successes did not last long. The bloody advance of the Catalan companies through the Balkan peninsula, after Roger de Flor’s murder, and the internal strife between the two Andronicoi, grandfather and grandson diverted the forces and attention of the Empire from the eastern border. The Ottomans seized their advantage, and in the last years of Andronicus the Elder and in the reign of Andronicus the Younger won some important successes in Asia Minor. The sultan Othman (Osman) and after him his son Orkhan conquered there the chief Byzantine cities, Brusa, Nicaea, and Nicomedia, and then reached the coast of the Sea of Marmora. Several cities of the western coast of Asia Minor began to pay tribute to the Turks. In 1341, when Andronicus III died, the Ottoman Turks had already become the real masters of Asia Minor, with the obvious intention of transferring hostilities into the European territory of the Empire and even threatening Constantinople itself; Thrace was exposed to continuous incursions from them. Meanwhile, the Seljuq emirates, fearing danger from the Ottomans, entered into friendly relations with the Empire in order to struggle against both the Latins and the Ottomans.

Byzantium and the rise of Serbia; Stephen Dushan (Dušan). — The possessions of Byzantium in the Balkan peninsula, at the end of the thirteenth century, embraced the whole of Thrace and southern Macedonia with Thessalonica; but the lands lying farther to the west and south — Thessaly, Epirus, and Albania — only partially recognized the power of the Empire, and not in equal degree. In the Peloponnesus the Empire under Michael Palaeologus had reconquered from the Franks Laconia in the southeast of the peninsula, and then the central province, Arcadia. In the rest of the Peloponnesus and middle Greece the Latins continued to rule. As to the Archipelago, Byzantium possessed only a few islands in the northern and northeastern portion of the sea.

        Parallel with the Ottoman danger in the East, another threatening danger to Byzantium was growing up in the Balkan peninsula, in the first half of the fourteenth century, from Serbia.

        The Serbs and the closely related, perhaps even identical, Croats made their appearance in the Balkan peninsula in the seventh century at the time of Emperor Heraclius and occupied the western part of the peninsula. While the Croats dwelling in Dalmatia and in the region between the rivers Sava and Drava began to enter into closer relations with the West, adopted Catholicism, and in the eleventh century lost their independence and came under the power of the Hungarian (Magyar) Kingdom, the Serbs remained faithful to Byzantium and the eastern church. For a long time, that is, up to the second half of the twelfth century, in contrast to the Bulgars the Serbs failed to form one unified state. They lived in independent districts or župy, at the head of which were župans. A tendency towards unification did not appear among the Serbs until the twelfth century, and coincided chronologically with the Bulgarian movement towards the foundation of the second Bulgarian Kingdom. Just as the Asen family led the movement in Bulgaria, so the family of the Nemanjas played a similar role in Serbia.

        The founder of the Serbian monarchy in the second half of the twelfth century was Stephen Nemanja, proclaimed “Great Župan,” the first to unify the Serbians by the power of his family. Thanks to successful wars with Byzantium and the Bulgars, he considerably increased the Serbian territory; then, having carried out his political task, he abdicated and ended his days as a monk in a monastery on Mount Athos. During the Third Crusade Stephen Nemanja entered into negotiations with the German king, Frederick Barbarossa, who at that time was on his way across the Balkan peninsuia, and offered him an alliance against the Byzantine emperor, if Frederick would allow Serbia to annex Dalmatia and keep the regions taken from Byzantium. These negotiations came to nothing.

        After a civil war between the sons of Stephen Nemanja, his son Stephen became ruler of the state and was crowned in 1217 by a papal legate. After the coronation he became King of Serbia and is known as the “first-crowned” King (Kral), “of all Serbia.” During his reign, the Serbian church received from the hands of the papal representative an independent head in the person of a Serbian archbishop. But the dependence of Serbia on the Roman church was short, and the new Kingdom remained faithful to the Eastern Orthodox church.

        The Latin Empire, in endeavoring to increase its influence in the Balkan peninsula, met with a great obstacle in the two Slavonic states, Bulgaria and Serbia. But after the fall of the Latin Empire in 1261 circumstances changed; the Latin Empire was replaced by the weak restored Byzantine Empire, and at about the same time Bulgaria, also weakened by internal troubles and reduced in territory, had little of its former strength. After 1261 Serbia became the most important state in the Balkan peninsula. But the Serbian kings committed a strategic error in failing to annex the western Serbian (Croatian) land; without having achieved national unification, they turned their attention to Constantinople.

        During the civil war between the two Andronicoi, the Serbian “Kral” (King) supported the grandfather. The victory of the Serbs in 1330 over the Bulgars, who were allies of Andronicus III, near Velbužd (now Köstendil), in Upper Macedonia, had great significance for the future of Serbia. The young prince, Stephen Dushan (Dušan), destined to be the famous king of Serbia, is believed, despite some discrepancy of sources,[94] to have had a decisive share in the victory. In his flight the Bulgarian king was unhorsed and slain. The results of the battle at Velbužd were of great importance to the young Serbian Kingdom. The Greco-Bulgarian alliance was dissolved, and, any possibility that Bulgaria might restrain the further rise of Serbia was destroyed forever. Thereafter the Kingdom of Serbia played the leading role in the Balkan peninsula.

        But Serbia reached the climax of her power under Stephen Dushan, 1331-55. Ten years before he mounted the throne, Stephen and his father had been crowned together with the benediction of the archbishop. Sources call him, therefore, “Stephen, the young Kral (King),” “rex juvenis,” in opposition to “the old Kral,” “rex veteranus.” T. Florinsky commented, “this simultaneous coronation of father and son was a new and remarkable phenomenon in the history of Serbia. It showed clearly the influence of Byzantium, where it was an old custom of the emperors to appoint their co-rulers and have them crowned with the imperial title.”[95]

        During the first ten years of his rule, while Andronicus III reigned in Byzantium, Stephen Dushan took advantage of the fact that the Emperor and John |Cantacuzene were occupied in the east by the Ottoman danger, to open his aggressive policy, on one hand, by the annexation of northern Macedonia, and on the other, by the occupation of the major part of Albania, where Andronicus’ troops had recently fought with success. Before the death of the Emperor in 1341, Stephen Dushan, though he had not fully developed his plans against Byzantium, nevertheless had already shown how strong an enemy he was to prove to the Empire.

Advance of the Albanians to the south. — In the first half of the fourteenth century, the Albanians for the first time began to play a considerable part in the history of the Balkan peninsula. Both Andronicus III and Stephen Dushan fought with them.

        Albania had never, from the time of classical antiquity, been able to form a single unified nation, and the history of the Albanians had always been a part of the history of some foreign people. Internally they were divided into small principalities and autonomous mountain tribes, and their interests were exclusively local. “Albania abounds in ancient remains which as yet have been unexplored. The history of Albania cannot, therefore, be written in its proper and final form without reference to the precious relics the Albanian soil has jealously guarded for centuries. It is only when these archeological treasures come to light that a really scientific history of Albania can be written.”[96]

        The ancestors of the Albanians were the ancient Illyrians, who dwelled along the eastern coast of the Adriatic Sea, from Epirus as far north as Pannonia. The Greek geographer of the second century A.D., Ptolemy, mentioned an Albanian tribe with a city of Albanopolis. The name of these Albanians was in the eleventh century extended to the rest of the ancient Illyrians. This people was called in Greek, Albanoi, Arbanoi, or Albanitai, Arbanitai; in Latin, Arbanenses or Albanenses; from the Latin or Roman form comes the Slavonic Arbanasi, in modern Greek Arvanitis, in Turkish Arnaut. The Albanians also call themselves Arber or Arben. Later on there appeared a new name for the Albanians, Shkipetars, the etymological origin of which has not been definitely fixed.[97] The Albanian language is now full of Roman elements, beginning with the ancient Latin language and ending with the Venetian dialect, so that some specialists call the Albanian tongue “a half-Romance mixed-language” (halbromanishe Mischsprache).[98] Of old the Albanians were a Christian people. In the earlier Byzantine time, Emperor Anastasius I, who came from the chief IIlyrian coast city of Dyrrachium (Durazzo), may have been Albanian. An Albanian origin for the family of Justinian the Great is also possible.

        Great ethnographic changes occurred in the Albanian population in the epoch of the so-called barbarian invasions of the fourth and fifth centuries, and of the gradual occupation of the peninsula by the Slavs. Later, the Albanians (not yet called in the sources by this name) were subject first to Byzantium, then to the Great Bulgaria of Simeon. For the first time, Albanian, as a general name for the whole people, appeared in the Byzantine sources of the eleventh century, after the Normano-Byzantine conflicts in the Balkan peninsula.[99] In the epoch of the Latin Empire and of the first Palaeologi the Albanians were successively controlled by the Despotat of Epirus, the second Bulgarian Empire, the Emperor of Nicaea John Ducas Vatatzes, and finally, by Charles of Anjou, who styled himself “by the grace of God the King of Sicily and Albania.” In the fourth decade of the fourteenth century, not long before Andronicus’ death, the Serbian king Stephen Dushan conquered the major part of Albania.

        At this time a strong movement of the Albanians towards the south began, at first into Thessaly, but extending later, in the second half of the fourteenth and in the fifteenth century, all over middle Greece, the Peloponnesus, and many islands of the Aegean Sea. This powerful stream of Albanian colonization is felt even today. A German scholar of the first half of the nineteenth century, Fallmerayer, came out with the astounding theory that the Greeks had been completely exterminated by the Slavs and Albanians; “not a single drop of pure Hellenic blood flows in the veins of the Christian population of modern Greece.” He wrote in the second volume of his History of the Peninsula of Morea in the Middle Ages, that, beginning with the second quarter of the fourteenth century, the Greek-Slavs who inhabited Greece were displaced and crushed by Albanian settlers, so that, in his opinion, the Greek revolution of the nineteenth century which freed Greece from the Turkish yoke, was in reality the work of Albanian hands. Fallmerayer journeyed through Greece and found in Attica, Boeotia, and the major part of the Peloponnesus a very great number of Albanian settlers, who sometimes did not even understand Greek. If one calls this country a new Albania, wrote the same author, one gives it its real name. Those provinces of the Greek Kingdom are no more closely related to Hellenism than the Scottish Highlands are to the Afghan regions of Kandahar and Kabul.[100]

        Although Fallmerayer’s theory as a whole is rejected, it is true that even today many islands of the Archipelago and almost all Attica as far as Athens are Albanian. According to the approximate statistics made by scholars, the Albanians in the Peloponnesus number now more than twelve per cent of the whole population (about 92,500 souls).[101] In 1854 J. G. Hahn, the author of a German work Albanian Studies, estimated that “of a total of one million inhabitants of Greece, about 173,000 were Albanians,” and a modern writer remarked: “No changes have occurred in the meantime to alter their position.”[102]

        Thus, the time of Andronicus III was marked by the beginning of Albanian colonization to the south in Greece as far as the Peloponnesus, and of an important ethnographical alteration among the population of the Greek peninsula.

Venice and Genoa. — Michael VIII’s government gave undoubted preference to Genoa in the rivalry between the two western commercial republics, Venice and Genoa. In connection with political conditions, he then restored friendly relations with Venice, making skillful use of the antagonism between the two republics. Andronicus II continued his father’s policy of privileges for Genoa, so that causes for conflict between Genoa and Venice continued to exist.

        Towards the end of the thirteenth century all Christian possessions in Syria were lost. In 1291 the Muhammedans took away from the Christians their last important coast city, Acre (Acca, ancient Ptolemaïs); all the rest of the coast cities surrendered to the Muhammedans almost without struggle. All Syria and Palestine passed into the possession of the Muhammedans.

        This event was a terrible blow to Venice, for by it she lost the whole southeast Mediterranean, where her trade for a long time had been predominant. On the other hand, the Genoese, with a solid footing on the Bosphorus, extended their influence in the Black Sea, where apparently they hoped for a trade monopoly. This was of particular importance in the Crimea, where both Venetians and Genoese colonies had already been established. Realizing the threatening danger to her commercial power Venice declared war on Genoa. Many of the hostilities took place on the territory or in the waters of the Byzantine Empire. The Venetian fleet breaking through the Hellespont and the Marmora sea pillaged and burnt the shores of the Bosphorus and the suburb of Galata, where the Genoese dwelt. The Genoese colony found safety behind the walls of Constantinople, whose Emperor actively supported the Genoese. The Venetians who lived in the capital were murdered. The Genoese obtained from Andronicus II an authorization to surround Galata with a wall and moat. Soon after, their quarters were embellished with many public and private buildings. At the head of the colony stood a podestá appointed from Genoa, who governed on the basis of certain regulations and had charge of the interests of all the Genoese who lived on the territory of the Empire. Thus, said T. Florinsky, “along with the orthodox Tsargrad there arose a small, but well fortified, Latin city with a Genoese podestá, republican organization, and Latin churches and monasteries. Genoa, besides its commercial significance, acquired great political importance in the Empire.”[103] Towards the time of the ascension of Andronicus III Galata became a sort of state within the state, and by the end of his reign this situation was very strongly felt. No real peace between Genoa and Venice was possible.

        Besides these two most powerful commercial republics there was considerable trade activity at Constantinople, at the end of the thirteenth and in the fourteenth century on the part of some other western cities which had their colonies there — for example, of Italy, Pisa, Florence, and Ancona — of the Adriatic Sea the Slavonic Ragusa (Dubrovnik),[104] and several south-French cities, like Marseilles.

        The reigns of the two Andronicoi, grandfather and grandson, came to sad conclusions. In the east the Ottoman Turks had become the masters of the situation in Asia Minor; in the Balkan peninsula Stephen Dushan had already obtained some real successes, which indicated his still broader plans for the future. The Catalan companies had terribly devastated many regions of the Empire in their march to the west. Finally, Genoese Galata, economically strong and politically almost independent, had established and fortified itself side by side with Constantinople.