John VIII (1425-48) and the Turkish menace.

        Under John VIII the territory of the Empire was reduced to the most modest extent. Shortly before his father’s death John had been forced to cede several cities of Thrace to the sultan. After John had become sole ruler of the Empire, his power extended, properly speaking, over Constantinople and the nearest surrounding country. But the rest of the Empire, for example, the Peloponnesus, Thessalonica, and some scattered cities in Thrace, were under the power of his brothers as separate principalities almost entirely independent.

        In 1430, Thessalonica was conquered by the Turks. One of the brothers of John VIII, who was governing Thessalonica with the title of despot, realized that with his own forces he could not contend with the Turks, and sold the city to Venice for a sum of money. Venice in taking possession of this important commercial point pledged herself, according to Ducas, “to protect and nourish it, raise its prosperity, and make it a second Venice.”[187] But the Turks, who already possessed the surrounding country, could not tolerate the establishment of Venice at Thessalonica. Under the personal leadership of the sultan, they laid siege to Thessalonica; the course and result of the siege are well described in a special work, On the last capture of Thessalonica, written by a contemporary, John Anagnostes (i.e., Reader).[188] The Latin garrison of Thessalonica was small and the population of the city regarded the new Venetian masters as aliens. They could not resist the Turks who, after a short siege, took the city by storm and exposed it to terrible destruction and outrage. The people were murdered without distinction of sex or age. Churches were turned into mosques, but the Church of St. Demetrius of Thessalonica, the chief patron of the city, was temporarily left to the Christians, though in a state of complete desolation.

        The taking of Thessalonica by the Turks was also described in Greek verse by a high church official in Constantinople in his Chronicle on the Turkish Empire.[189] Some Greek folk songs were composed on this disastrous event.[190] The loss of Thessalonica impressed deeply both Venice and western Europe. The nearness of the decisive moment was of course also felt in the city of Constantinople.

        An interesting description of Constantinople was written by a pilgrim returning from Jerusalem, a Burgundian knight, Bertrandon de la Broquière, who visited the capital of the Palaeologi at the beginning of the thirties, shortly after the fall of Thessalonica. He praised the good state of the walls, the land-walls in particular, but noticed some desolation in the city; he spoke for example of the ruins and remnants of two beautiful palaces destroyed, according to a tradition, by an Emperor at the command of a Turkish sultan. The Burgundian pilgrim visited the churches and other monuments of the capital, attended the solemn church services, saw in the church of St. Sophia the performance of a mystery on the subject of the three youths cast by Nebuchadnezzar into the fiery furnace, was charmed with the beauty of the Byzantine Empress, who came from Trebizond, and told the Emperor, who was interested in the fate of Joan of Arc, who had just been burnt at Rouen, “the whole truth” about the famous “Maid of Orléans.”[191] The same pilgrim, from his observations of the Turks, believed it possible to expel them from Europe and even to regain Jerusalem. He wrote; “It seems to me that the noble people and the good government of the three nations I have mentioned, i.e., the French, English, and German, are rather formidable, and, if they are united in sufficient number, will be able to reach Jerusalem by land.”[192]

        Realizing the coming danger to the capital from the Turks, John VIII undertook the great work of restoring the walls of Constantinople. Many inscriptions on the walls preserved today with the name of “John Palaeologus Autocrat in Christ,” testify to the Christian Emperor’s difficult last attempt to restore the fortifications of Theodosius the Younger, which had once appeared inaccessible.

        But this did not suffice for the struggle with the Ottomans. Like his predecessors, John VIII hoped to receive real help against the Turks from the West, with the co-operation of the pope. For this purpose the Emperor himself with the Greek patriarch and a brilliant retinue sailed for Italy. The result of this journey was the conclusion of the famous Union of Florence. As far as real help to Byzantium was concerned, however, the imperial journey to Italy was of no avail.

        Pope Eugenius IV preached a crusade and succeeded in arousing to war against the Turks the Hungarians, Poles, and Roumanians. A crusading army was formed under the command of the king of Poland and Hungary, Vladislav, and the famous Hungarian hero and chief, John Hunyadi. In the battle at Varna, in 1444, the crusaders were crushed by the Turks. Vladislav fell in battle. With the remnants of the army, John Hunyadi retreated to Hungary. The battle of Varna was the last attempt of western Europe to come to the help of perishing Byzantium. Thereafter Constantinople was left to its fate.[193]

        Some documents from the archives of Barcelona, comparatively recently published, have revealed the aggressive plans of the famous Maecenas of the epoch of the Renaissance, the king of Aragon, Alfonso V the Magnanimous, who died in 1458. Having reunited Sicily and Naples under his power for a short time in the middle of the fifteenth century, he was planning to carry on a vast aggressive campaign in the East, which was similar to the grandiose plans of Charles of Anjou. Constantinople was one of Alfonso’s goals, and the idea of a crusade against the Turks never left him. For a long time he had realized that, if the growing might and “insolent prosperity” of the Ottomans were not put down, he would have no security for the maritime confines of his realm. But Alfonso’s ambitious plans were not realized and the Turks were never seriously menaced by this talented and brilliant humanist and politician.[194]

        After the victory of the Turks at Varna, John VIII, who had taken no part in the crusading expedition, entered immediately into negotiations with the sultan, whom he endeavored to soften with presents, and he succeeded in keeping peaceful relations with him up to the end of his reign.

Although in relations with the Turks, Byzantium under John VIII suffered continuous and bitter failures, the Greek arms gained a considerable victory, though of short duration, in the Peloponnesus (Morea), an appanage nearly independent from the central government. Besides the Byzantine possessions, there were in the Peloponnesus the remnants of the principality of Achaia and some other places, especially in the very south of the peninsula which belonged to Venice. At the beginning of the fifteenth century Venice set herself the goal of subduing the portion of the Peloponnesus which was still in Latin hands; for this purpose she entered into negotiations with the different rulers in the peninsula. On one hand, the Republic of St. Mark wanted to take possession of the wall on the Isthmus of Corinth, which had been built under Manuel II, in order to offer adequate resistance to the Turkish invasions. On the other, Venice was attracted by her commercial interests, because, according to the information gathered by the representative of the Republic, the resources of the country in gold, silver, silk, honey, corn, raisins, and other things promised great advantages. During the reign of John VIII, however, the troops of the Greek despotat in Morea opened hostilities against the Latins, quickly gained the Latin part of the Peloponnesus, and thereby put an end to Frankish power in Morea. From then to the time of the Turkish conquest, the whole peninsula belonged to the family of the Palaeologi; Venice maintained only the points in the south, which she had possessed before.

        One of the Despots of Morea, Constantine, John VIII’s brother, who was to be the last emperor of Byzantium, took advantage of some difficulties of the Turks in the Balkan peninsula to march north with his troops across the Isthmus of Corinth into middle and northern Greece, where the Turks were already making their conquests. After his victory over the Christians at Varna, Sultan Murad II considered the invasion of Constantine into northern Greece as an insult to him; he marched south, broke through the fortified wall on the Isthmus of Corinth, terribly devastated the Peloponnesus, and carried away into captivity a great number of Greeks. The horrified Despot Constantine was glad to make peace on the sultan’s terms; he remained Despot of Morea and pledged himself to pay a tribute to the sultan.

        Under Constantine Palaeologus the famous traveler, archeologist, and merchant of that time, Cyriacus of Ancona, visited Mistra, where he was graciously received by the despot (Constantinum cognomento Dragas) and his dignitaries. At his court Cyriacus met Gemistus Plethon, “the most learned man of his age,” and Nicholas Chalcocondyles, son of his Athenian friend George, a young man very well versed in Latin and Greek.[195] Nicholas Chalcocondyles can have been none other than the future historian Laonikos Chalcocondyles, for the name Laonikos is merely Nicolaos, Nicholas, slightly changed. During his first stay at Mistra, under the Despot Theodore Palaeologus, in 1437, Cyriacus had visited ancient monuments at Sparta and copied Greek inscriptions.[196]