The End of the Byzantine Empire, 1081-1453

[Excerpted from Edson Clark, Turkey (New York: P. F. Collier, 1898), pp. 63-74]

In the year 1081, a successful rebellion raised Alexis Comnenus to the throne an emperor famous in history for his connection with the First Crusade. Alexis took Constantinople by storm. The city was pillaged and in part destroyed, thus receiving the first great blow which had ever been inflicted upon it. From this time on, the incessant march of the vast crusading hosts became to the government of the Empire the one topic of absorbing interest and its source of greatest danger. The First Crusade (in 1096-7) afforded Alexis some temporary relief by breaking the power of the Turkish Kingdom of Roum, and restoring the western half of Asia Minor to the Empire. 13ut the help brought to the Greeks by the Crusaders was transient and delusive, while the danger to the Empire from these vast barbarian movements was constant and ever increasing. The Crusaders accused the Greek government and people of indifference, and even of hostility to their cause. The mutual jealousies of race and religion were deepened by the licentious, marauding propensities of the Crusaders into a fierce and deadly enmity, until, finally, the adventurers of the West, forgetting their vows and the purpose for which they had ranged themselves under the banner of the Cross, turned their arms against their fellow Christians of the Empire. That Empire was already rotten to the core and well deserving of such a fate, when, in 1203, the knights of the Fourth Crusade, aided by the Venetians, laid siege to Constantinople. The inadequate garrison defended the city with great bravery, but fortune soon decided in favor of the besiegers, and on the 12th of April, 1204, the ancient capital of the Caesars bowed for the first time to a foreign foe.' Then followed a scene of horror rarely surpassed in all the dark history of war. The victorious Crusaders setfire to the city, and in the light of a vast and awful conflagration entered upon their fiendish work of plunder, lust, and blood. The city was ruined. Those of its opulent citizens who escaped with life, after having seen their houses plundered, their wives dishonored, and their children reduced to slavery, were driven forth in poverty beyond the walls. Every insult was heaped by the Catholic victors upon the ceremonies and the churches of the Greek faith. Horses were stabled in some of the churches, while others were made the scenes of licentious orgies too vile to be described. At length, after these scenes of horror had continued for several days, the Latin leaders restored some semblance of order, divided their enormous booty, proceeded to organize the government, and on the 9th of May, 1204, elected Baldwin, Count of Flanders, the first Latin Emperor of Constantinople.

The new Latin Empire, however, was but a pitiful counterfeit of even the degenerate Greek Empire of the twelfth century. In the nominal division of their conquests, the Crusaders allowed to the new Emperor but a fourth part of the Byzantine dominions, while, in fact, the Empire of Baldwin soon embraced little more than the city of Constantinople, with the adjacent regions of Thrace. The Venetians reserved for their share the provinces of the northwest, with Adrianople for their capital, while Macedonia and Greece, under the name of the Kingdom of Saloniki, or Thessalonica, were bestowed upon Boniface, Marquis of Montferrat. The conquest of the capital, however, was very far from securing to the Latins the full possession of the Empire. Two members of the imperial family succeeded in establishing themselves as independent sovereigns. Michael Angelos Comnenus. became the first Despot of Epirus; and a few years later his brother and successor, Theodore, having expelled Demetrius, the son of Boniface, from Macedonia, and the Venetians from Adrianople, assumed the title of Emperor Of Thessalonica. Alexis Comnenus was Governor of Trebizond, when Constantinople was taken by the Crusaders. Assuming the purple as heir to the throne, he and his successors continued their poor play of imperial greatness in that distant province, until it was ended by Mohammed II in 1461.

The honor of the Greek name and arms, however, was most successfully vindicated by Theodore Lascaris, who had been hastily invested with the imperial purple in the midst of the tumult occasioned by the final assault of the city by the Crusaders. Theodore escaped across the Bosphorus, and, by his prudence and ability, soon succeeded in reorganizing the poor remains of Byzantine power and dominion in northwestern Asia Minor. The important city of Nicaea opened its gates to him, and became for nearly sixty years the capital of a fourth Empire, which, by its prosperity and growing power, soon made good its claim to be regarded as the true representative of the ancient dominion of the Caesars. Theodore Lascaris (1204-1222) and his two successors, John III. (1222-1254) and Theodore Lascaris II (1254-1258), were all of them men of character, courage, and unusual ,administrative ability. Under their government, the history of the Empire of Nicaea presents one of the most pleasing and instructive portions of the later Byzantine annals. The affairs of the Church were kept, to a far greater extent than formerly, separate from those of the state. The government was administered with liberality, economy, and vigor. The people, now proprietors of the lands they tilled, and made to feel a personal interest in the government, not only became industrious and prosperous, but rapidly regained their long lost military spirit The Empire of John III presented to the world the strange spectacle of a Greek Empire, strong in the field by the valor of its own citizens, and wealthy and prosperous through the agricultural and manufacturing industry of a free people. The Empire of Nicaea thus soon found itself superior in military strength to all its neighbors, and extended its limits on every hand. The power of the Seljfikian Turks was now thoroughly decayed, and the several emirs, little else than independent sovereigns in their several provinces, were no match for the well-organized forces of their Greek neighbors. The Empire of Thessalonica possessed no elements of enduring strength, and its feeble existence soon came to an end. About the year 124o, Theodore Comnenus resigned the crown to John III., and the two Empires were again united.

The Latin Empire, the abortive result of the conquest of Constantinople by the Crusaders, pursued its feeble and inglorious career for a period of fifty seven years, without revenues or resources of any kind, and with no military strength but what they derived from western adventurers, who, for a short time, flocked to Constantinople to share in the spoils of the East; the Latin Emperors were soon reduced to wander from court to court in western Europe, begging for succors which were grudgingly and scantily bestowed. At last, this poor shadow of an Empire wholly faded away, and in 1261 Michael Paleologus, Emperor of Nicma, recovered Con. stantinople by the aid of the Genoese, and restored the Byzantine Empire.'

By this achievement Michael Paleologus acquired a renown which he in no wise deserved. " He was a type of the Constantinopolitan Greek nobles and officials in the Empire he founded and transmitted to his descendants. He was selfish, hypocritical, able, and accomplished; an inborn liar, meddling and ambitious, and rapacious. . . . He ought to be execrated as the corrupter of the Greek race."' With the recovery of Constantinople, the short-lived revival of the social and political life of the Greeks, which had appeared in the Empire of Nicaea, came to a sudden end. All the old vices of the Empire were revived in an exaggerated form. " Literary taste, political honesty, patriotic feeling, military honor, civil liberty, and judicial purity, seem all to have abandoned the Greek race."'


Both the capital and the Empire were now but the miserable wrecks of their former greatness. The wealth and splendor of Constantinople were gone, its commerce was neglected and ruined. The Genoese had established a strong commercial colony at Galata, one of the suburbs of Constantinople, and the fierce war which they were waging with the Venetians led to obstinate conflicts within the very walls of the city. Three great fires, kindled by the victorious Crusaders, had left a large part of Constantinople a dreary waste of ashes and blackened ruins. Finlay cites Villehardouin, the historian of the Latin conquest, as affirming that more buildings were destroyed by these three fires than were contained in the three largest cities of France.'

The Turkish emirs, now stronger than the Emperors, were already crowding the Greeks steadily back to the sea, when, a little later than the year 1300, the conquest of Prfisa, or Brftsa, by Orchan, the son of Othman, laid the foundation of the Ottoman Empire. The new power advanced with rapid strides, and Asia Minor was soon lost* forever to the Greeks; nor were the Turks long confined to Asia. They crossed the narrow straits of the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles, and ravaged almost unresisted the opposite districts of Thrace. Turkish mercenaries became the principal military reliance of the imperial government. A deeper disgrace has rarely been inflicted upon the Christian name, than when the Empress regent Anne of Savoy and John Cantacuzene, in their civil struggle for the possession of the throne (1341-1346), both depended for success upon Turkish allies, and both paid their barbarian hirelings by allowing them to carry off into slavery the Christian inhabitants of Thrace. Yet a lower depth of degradation was reached, if such a thing were possible, when about the year 1390, the Emperor Manuel, displaying the imperial standard at the head of the Greek contingent, attended Sultan Bajazet, as his humble vassal, to the siege of Philadelphia. The brave citizens of that last sad stronghold of Greek municipal vigor and independence at first disregarded Bajazet's summons to surrender, But when they saw the Emperor and the imperial standard among their besiegers, their hearts sunk within them, and they opened their gates in despair.

Amurath I., the successor of Orchan (1360-1389), made himself master of the greater part of the European possessions of the Empire, and removed his capital from Bursa to Adrianople. From this time until the defeat and capture of Bajazet by Timour, in 1402, the Greek Emperors remained the humble vassals of the Turks.

The hour of doom to the ancient Empire of Constantinople, inevitable though long delayed, was now near at hand. The time had come when the last mission of that Empire could be performed. With all their feebleness, their intellectual stupor, and their childish superstition, the Greeks still preserved in all their perfection, for a fresher soil and a brighter,day, the ancient language and literature of their race. The new custodians of this priceless treasure were now ready to receive their trust. In northwestern Italy there had sprung up a cluster of little commercial republics, foremost among which were Pisa, Genoa, and Florence. Full of youthful vigor and enterprise, these little states grew rich and powerful, and gradually drew to themselves a large share of the ancient trade of Constantinople. With this traffic came great naval power, and the sudden and wonderful accumulation of wealth. And with power, wealth, and the energetic, intense activity which characterized the people of these small but glorious republics, there soon came also increasing civilization and refinement and an eager thirst for knowledge. About the middle of the fourteenth century appeared the two immortal Tuscans, Petrarch and Boccaccio, the splendid first fruits of the learning and letters of regenerated Europe. Until that time there had been very few men in all the nations of Western Europe who could read the New Testament in the original Greek. This long reign of darkness and ignorance was now to be broken. In the year 1360, Leo Pilatus took up his residence at Florence, in the house of Boccaccio, and became the first teacher of Greek in Italy; and about the year 1400, an eminent Greek named Manuel Chrysoloras established at Florence a school for teaching the language and literature of his native land. That school was soon crowded by the gcnerous youth of Italy, and ere long the new learning had taken vigorous root in this fresh and fruitful soil. The mission of the Greek Empire was now accomplished. It had faithfully preserved, and safely transmitted to the rising civilization of modern times, the inestimable treasures of the ancient world. Venerable in nothing but age, feeble and decrepit with the burden of years, it was now to sink into the grave.

After the restoration of the Ottoman power, in 1413, the great ambition of the Turkish Sultans was the capture of Constantinople and the destruction of the Greek Empire. This grand enterprise was first and vainly attempted by Amurath II with an army of two hundred thousand men, in 1422. This was the last escape of the devoted city. Thirty years later Mohammed II repeated the attempt in which his father had failed, with ampler resources and more complete preparation; and in the month of February, 145 3, the final siege of Constantinople was formed.

The fall of the city was not without dignity, nor altogether unworthy of its ancient fame. Constantine Paleologus, the last of the Emperors, was a brave and patriotic man, and worthy of a happier fate. He determined to defend the city to the last, and if it fell, to perish beneath its ruins. The garrison, made up largely of Latin auxiliaries, seconded his valor with the courage of despair, and the success of the Turks was not won without a tremendous and destructive conflict. But as the siege progressed, the walls crumbled under the fire of the Turkish artillery, the garrison was thinned and exhausted, and it was evident that the end was near. The final assault was made on the 29th of May. After a short but terrible struggle, the Emperor fell bravely fighting in the post of extremest danger; the Turks surmounted the walls, and the ancient Empire of the East was no more. Upon the terrible scenes which followed a repetition of the horrors endured by the city upon its first fall before the arms of the Crusaders--we need not dwell. Suffice it to say that the city was abandoned to the passions of the soldiery, its remaining wealth was plundered, and vast multitudes of the wretched people, after suffering every outrage that the cruelty of their captors could inflict; were chained together in droves and driven to a distant: and hopeless slavery. When the Turks departed they left behind them a depopulated, empty city. They left however, soon to return, to make Constantinople the capital of their own Empire, and the seat of a mightier power than any which, with a stable and enduring dominion, had for centuries swayed the destinies of the East'